Dogs of War

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The phone rang, and it shook me out of a bad dream about attending my own funeral. The ringing of my cell phone wove itself so seamlessly into the fabric of the dream that I thought they’d buried me with it. I tried to move inside the narrow coffin, but my elbows kept hitting the silk-lined sides and I couldn’t get my hand into the right pocket. I knew that it was Junie calling me from the graveside, trying to tell me that it was okay, that she would be fine, that she was moving on now that I was dead. And then the thread of the dream unraveled and I came awake crying out her name. All at once I was back on the deck of the Pier, the DMS Special Projects office in San Diego. The deck was empty except for my dog, Ghost, and me. He raised his head, saw that there was no danger, heard the phone continue to ring, and gave me a withering look and flopped back down.

The phone was on a side table amid a forest of empty beer bottles. San Diego is the Mecca of craft breweries, and I am a devout worshipper. Maybe a little too devout these past few months.

“Junie,” I said again as I fished for the phone, but as I blinked my eyes clear it was obvious from the display that it wasn’t Junie. Instead, I saw SEAN on the screen. My brother, which is weird enough in its own way. He never calls me. Sean is a homicide detective back in Baltimore, where we grew up. What the folks back home call a murder cop. Sean’s a good guy, but in the past couple of years we’ve kind of drifted. It happens. Back when we were both detectives in different squads in the same town, we were tight. We had so much in common. We could sit up all night drinking beer and telling stories about the job. But that was then. Now he catches killers and I try to keep the world from falling off its hinges. He can still talk about his job, but we can’t ever talk about mine. Makes for long, weird silences at Thanksgiving and Christmas. All he knows is that I work for a covert intelligence department. He doesn’t even know its name. Our common ground is all past-tense stuff, and sometimes it leaves us with only sports and the weather to chat about.

I thumbed the button and said, “Sean.”

“Hey, Joe.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Huh?”

“Is Dad okay?”

“What? Oh. Sure. He’s fine. He’s out on a date.”

“Wait… what? Dad’s on a date? Why?”

Sean laughed. “Why not? People do date, you know. Even old guys. It’s been known to happen.”

“Dad’s not allowed to date,” I protested.

“Joe, Dad’s been alone for a long time.”

It was true enough. Our mom died years ago, but like most children — even adult children — I naturally assumed that our father would be in some kind of permanent state of mourning. How could he even want to date? It didn’t compute with the part of me that will always be a kid rather than a grown son.

“Who’s he out with?” I demanded.

“The artist lady.”

“What artist lady?”

“Jesus, Joe,” said Sean. “He’s been seeing her for six months. Michelle Garry. She’s great. How do you not know this?”

“You sound like you approve of Dad running around with some strange woman.”

Sean sighed. “Oh, right. I forgot he has to get your written approval before he has a life.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?”

I had no answer to that, because it pretty much was what I meant. So, like any coward, I changed the subject.

“What’s happening, Sean? Ali and the kids okay?” I had a first-grader nephew, Ryan, whom we all called Lefty, because even at eight he had one hell of a fastball, and a little niece, Emily — known as Em — who was a rambunctious three.

“Yes, Joe,” said Sean, “we’re all okay.” He paused, though he sounded uncertain of his reply. “Actually, though… this isn’t a social call. It’s business.”

“Business?”

“It’s about a case,” he said.

I dug a fresh beer out of the cooler by my chair, twisted off the top, took a sip, and rested the sweating bottle on my belly. The cold felt nice. “Since when do you call me about cases? Or did something happen with one of my old cases?”

It happens sometimes. Even though, like Sean, I had a high clearance record when I was a detective, there were plenty of cases that went unsolved, and, with advances in forensics, old cold cases sometimes get hot again.

“No,” said Sean, “this is something else.”

“What is it, then?”

He paused again. “Look, I know that you work for one of those top-secret agencies that you can’t talk about, but—”

“But you’re talking about it.”

“No, it’s just that—” he said, and then hesitated now that he was up to the edge of it. “Look, after what happened at the ballpark that time, Dad kind of… you know… let something slip.”

Our dad was the mayor of Baltimore and two years ago he’d gone to Citizens Bank Park in Philly to co-host the opening day of baseball with the Philly mayor. That was the day the Seven Kings hit the place with a bunch of small drones carrying high explosives. A lot of people died, and Dad was almost one of them. It really rattled him, and Dad’s not an easy guy to shake. I guess I could imagine the conversation between him and Sean afterward. Maybe over drinks late one night after Sean’s family was in bed. Father and son. Former cop and current cop, swapping stories, sharing confidences.

“What, exactly, did Dad say?” I asked.

“Not much,” said Sean. “No details. Just a little bit about the kinds of cases you handle. Weird stuff.”

“Like…?”

“Like you going after terrorists who have cutting-edge science weapons. General stuff. But he kind of hinted that you had something to do with what happened in Philly. Not just the ballpark but before that… at the Liberty Bell Center when the terrorists released whatever kind of plague or chemical or whatever that made people go apeshit. You know what I’m talking about.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I read about it in the papers.”

“Come on, Joe…”

“Dad told you all this? What else did he say?”

“Well, it’s not like he said who you worked for, but, Joe… Dad’s proud of you. He said you saved a lot of lives.”

I said nothing.

“He said you caught the bastards who did all that.”

I said nothing.

“He said that if I ever caught a whiff of something like that… I should call you.”

“Something like what? A terrorist group?”

“That’s just it, Joe. I don’t know what I have, but I think I need your help. I don’t know who else to call. Hell, I don’t know who I can trust.”

“Sean, what are you talking about? What’s happening?”

There was a long pause this time. “Joe… something really bad is happening here, and I don’t know what to do about it. I… I’m scared, man. Really scared.”

I said, “Tell me.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Deputy Director Sarah Schoeffel spent three days at the DARPA camp.

When she arrived it was to receive a briefing about new robotics hardware and computer software that was being developed for the military, and about versions of the technology that might be made available to Homeland Security. Her own counter-cyberterrorism division of the FBI needed more tech, and a Senate subcommittee had arranged her visit here.

Some of what she saw was truly encouraging, and at first she wasn’t a fan, but with each day, each demonstration of counterterrorism technology, she could feel her resistance ebbing.

“This,” said Major Schellinger as she escorted Schoeffel into a cabin lined with computer workstations and staffed with programmers who typed furiously, “is WhiteHat. And I imagine this is one of the projects that will interest you most.”

Schoeffel bent and looked over the shoulder of one of the programmers, trying to get a sense of the code he was writing.

“WhiteHat is a brand-new line of adaptive artificial-intelligence programs that were designed to think like hackers in order to anticipate cyberattacks,” the major explained.

Major Schellinger went through the systems, and Schoeffel was dazzled by the power, sophistication, and subtlety of WhiteHat. And she was flattered to learn that some of her recommendations to the Senate subcommittee had influenced a number of the system’s components. WhiteHat’s overall level of sophistication was intimidating, but Schoeffel felt that was appropriate. Guns were intimidating, too, until they were pointed in the right direction.

She was less sanguine about some of the other projects being tested at the camp.

“You’re not serious?” she blurted after Schellinger introduced her to the group building the next generation of autonomous-drive combat machines.

Schellinger held up placating hands. “I know, I know, this is scary, but—”

“Does ‘scary’ really cover it, Major? America does not have the best track record when it comes to AI being used for combat systems. It was AI-driven fighter planes that destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge. They’re not even done building the new one and you want to put an even more advanced set of self-guided drones in the air?”

Schellinger’s eyes were cold, her smile colder. “While it’s true that most of the autonomous-combat-vehicle programs were scrapped in the aftermath of that terrible day, and rightly so, we are not going in the same direction. The Department of Defense has made it very clear that there needs to be a stronger and more reliable Off switch that would allow our handlers to be able to take back control at a moment’s notice.”

“How certain are we that people can take back control of these machines?” asked Schoeffel.

“I can absolutely guarantee,” said the major, “that no machine we create — not one drone, fighter jet, tank, or WarDog — will be off the leash. They work for us.”

“What about GPS hacking and computer viruses?”

The major shook her head. “They will all be keyed to a very specific command program that will require new control codes twice per day. Those codes will be generated and sent to commanders and handlers in 128-bit encrypted bursts. And we can use satellites to send random system checks that will require the machines to perform certain quick noncombative functions to prove that they’re not under unauthorized control. Should any system check get an anomalous response, the entire CPU will be isolated and shut down.”

She ran through a number of other impressive safeguards, and gradually Schoeffel found the last of her resistance melting away.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The containers arrived by train. One shipment per week for most of the past year, then two, and in the past few weeks there had been three trainloads. Long, winding snakes of cars that came from factories in Chicago, Lake Forest, Minneapolis, Trenton, Tempe, and Bethesda. Thousands of twenty- and forty-foot containers offloaded into the endless stacks awaiting their ships. Then the bomb carts — special chassis designed to move the cans from stacks to cranes — brought them to the docks in an endless loop. Massive gantry cranes plucked the cans off the carts and set them down on the deck of the cargo ships. The bottom rows weren’t secured by anything except the weight of the cans placed on top, but each additional layer was held fast by twistlocks, lashing bars, and turnbuckles. It was all done with professional efficiency and natural diligence. Loaded, secured, and then gone.

Fourteen days before Havoc, the last of the foreign shipments set sail aboard the MSC William Tell, a Swiss supercargo ship built at the Daewoo Shipbuilding yard in South Korea. It was one of the big ones, with a cargo capacity for carrying more than nineteen thousand of the twenty-foot cans, and a third of the cargo came from those special trains. The rest were filled with tens of thousands of tons of packs of chemicals to be used for spraying and controlling mosquito populations.

Inspection of the cargo was done by men and women who had been in their jobs for years. Most of them thought they worked for the docks, the customs office, or the city of Baltimore. Officials in receiving ports held the same view, as did the thirty-five-man crew of the William Tell.

Most of them were wrong.

Very wrong.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It started with a girl. That’s what Sean told me.

“Her name is Kya,” he said. “Well, was Kya, but that’s just a street name. That’s her work name. Her real name is Holly Sterman, and she would have been fifteen years old on Christmas Day. She died two days ago.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“It’s the craziest damn thing. One minute she was talking to her mom on the phone and the next she goes psycho and kills two adult men.”

“Gun?”

“No,” he said, “teeth. She bit them to death.”

The world around me suddenly went quiet. “What did you say?”

“Look, Joe,” said Sean quickly, “this is complicated. She was a runaway from Wilmington. A report was filed, but no one looked for her — you know how that is.”

“Yeah, yeah, get back to the part where she bit two guys. Why? Was it drugs? Was she hyped up on flakka?”

There was a nasty and very potent new designer drug on the streets called flakka that was driving many users into fits of screaming rage accompanied by vivid hallucinations. Chemically speaking, it was a cousin to the group of drugs commonly — and incorrectly — known as bath salts. Both are synthetic versions of naturally occurring amphetamine-like substances called cathinones. Flakka variations range from stuff that makes users mildly grouchy to stuff that turns them into violent aggressors. The high is, according to the junkies, worth the side effect. For the record, this is one of the reasons I hate people.

“That’s what I thought,” said Sean. “But no, her tox screen was clean. A little grass, but that’s it.”

“Then what happened?”

Sean told me the basics. Holly was a frequent flyer at one of those roach-infested West Baltimore hotels whose rooms are on yearly lease by people who sublet them by the hour. Not that Baltimore holds the patent on hot-pillow joints. Working as Kya, and with a fake driver’s license that said she was twenty-two, she turned tricks sometimes eight or nine times a night. Sean had been able to piece that together from surveillance video of the hotel that was part of another case being investigated by one of his buddies working a joint thing with the ATF. Kya/Holly was tagged as a likely prostitute working in the same place as the suspect, who was using the place as a showroom to sell handguns to gangbangers. When the gunrunner was busted the surveillance ended, but there was enough for Sean to verify that Holly was a regular, going in and out with a variety of men, none of whom were probably her Bible-study coach.

“And nobody thought to pick up an underage prostitute?” I asked.

“The investigating team handed it off to vice,” Sean explained, “but they had Kya down as an adult. Stupid, really. All they had to do was look at her. Bottom line is she was still on the job when the incident occurred.”

I took a sip of beer. It didn’t taste as good as it had. “Tell me about this incident.”

“It’s really weird, Joe.”

“Try me. Weird is pretty much what I do for a living.”

He ran it down for me, and, yeah, it was weird. The screams, the super, the dead john. He pieced together the details from a hysterical eyewitness report by the nephew of the super and through forensic reconstruction of the scene. The girl somehow overpowered or outfought her customer and then attacked the super, who tried unsuccessfully to defend himself with a baseball bat.

“The bat hit her on the shoulder, Joe,” said Sean. “It was the only injury the super inflicted. Remember that. It’s important.”

The girl tackled the super, grabbed his hair, and proceeded to slam his head against the hardwood floor with such force that his skull split. She didn’t stop there, though. She beat him nearly to death, pausing only long enough to bite his nose and upper lip completely off. The uncle had accidentally knocked the door shut when he was attacked and fell against it, so that the nephew couldn’t force his way in. The nephew said he could hear the sound of his uncle screaming for almost five minutes. Which is a minute shy of when the police arrived in response to the nephew’s 911 call.

“The john and the girl were DOA at the scene, and the super died on the table at the hospital,” concluded Sean.

“I have some questions I have to ask, and I can’t explain why.”

“Dad figured you might.”

“First, did the other victims try to attack anyone?”

“Huh? I told you, one was dead and the other was critical.”

“Okay. That’s good.”

“How’s that good?”

“Second,” I said, evading his question, “you said the girl bit both men. Did she actually eat them?”

“Jesus, Joe, what kind of question is that?”

“An important one. Did you analyze her stomach contents to see if she—”

“No, you freak, it’s bad enough already. This isn’t The Walking-fucking-Dead.”

Sean couldn’t know it, but he’d set up his account as if he were describing an outbreak of the Seif al Din pathogen, which was the doomsday bioweapon terrorists released at the Liberty Bell Center. That plague was why I joined. And, yeah, it pretty much rocked a real-world version of something that was way too close to a zombie apocalypse scenario. Seif al Din had some variations, but in every case the infected not only bit their victims but fed on them. Anyone bitten but left more or less whole would reanimate as a mindless killer. Seif al Din is one of a special class of pathogens that hotwire the central nervous system and bring the recently dead back to life as mindless and aggressive disease vectors. It wasn’t the first time some psychopath with a chemistry set took inspiration from pop culture. Not a joke.

“I need you to be really sure about this, Sean.”

“I am sure. Only thing in her stomach was a partially digested McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish and some ginger ale. She spit out the, um, stuff she bit off the two men.”

“Thank God,” I breathed. Ghost was looking at me now, tense because I was tense. Maybe scared because I was scared. “Who killed the girl?”

“I’ll get to that, but let me tell the rest of it first,” said Sean. “When the uniforms entered the room, they found her dead. She was naked and her eyes were open. Wide open. So was her mouth. It was like she died screaming.”

“Did the super manage to —?”

He cut me off. “No. She just collapsed and died.”

“From what?”

Instead of answering, he said, “When I reconstructed the scene, I realized that the john she’d killed hadn’t been her customer. This guy had been in the room next door with another girl. That girl said her john was pissed by all the screaming they heard coming through the wall, so he went next door to tell her to shut up, and that’s when she attacked him. One of my forensics guys found a cell phone and determined that Kya had been in the middle of making a call when she freaked out. She was estranged from her family and they live out of town, so I’ve got a phone interview set up with them.”

It was a sad story and, except for the biting part, all too common. The number of teenage runaways is staggering, far more than most people think. Every year more than a million and a half kids run away. Most return home or are found, but hundreds of thousands vanish. In dysfunctional families, particularly where abuse is a factor, the majority of the kids who run away are girls. Eighty percent of homeless girls have been physically or sexually abused. Some of those kids are never found. Of those, a bunch grow up to be fringe dwellers — junkies, squatters, and the like. Others are pulled into different kinds of human trafficking under false identities, and a lot of the time it’s forced sex work. It’s appalling, and the problem is accelerating rather than slowing down. Because so many teens run from bad homes, there isn’t always a lot of family push to find them. And some kids will do anything to keep from being found. This girl, Kya — or Holly — was probably one of those statistics, and Sean and I both knew that the system wouldn’t burn up a lot of calories seeking justice for her. It was a national embarrassment, and it was a tragedy. A life erased and all its potential extinguished. Just like that.

“She was such a little thing, Joe,” said Sean, and I could hear more of the father than the cop in his tone. “Nowhere near a hundred pounds. Skinny, with red hair and freckles. She’d have grown up to be beautiful, but even if she was short, fat, and ugly it comes to the same thing. Someone did this to her.”

“Did what, Sean? You still haven’t told me how she died.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the thing. There was no obvious cause of death. No wounds of any kind except some scratch marks from the big man and the broken arm from the super’s bat. No track marks, and, like I said, no drugs in her system. Not even a beer. I got the ME to put some topspin on the autopsy.”

“Who’s the ME these days? Is it still Dr. Jakobs?”

“Yeah. Old fart is a pain in the ass, but he’s the best medical examiner in the city.” Sean lowered his voice to a secretive, confidential level. “He said there were two causes of death.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Joe, she was in the advanced stages of rabies infection.”

“Rabies? That doesn’t make sense. You said she was turning tricks and calling her mother on the phone right before the incident. How could she do that if she was that badly infected with rabies?”

“Yeah, well, that’s where this gets weirder. We released some of the case details to the press, and even the rabies got only two seconds of coverage: ‘Teenage prostitute with rabies bites two other people, and all three die in violent struggle.’ You didn’t see that on the news?”

“No.” Which was, I admit, a little odd, and I thought about the stack of reports on my desk that I’d only halfway waded through. It might be buried in all that backlog. On the other hand, it couldn’t have been too grave a case — three corpses notwithstanding — because there was no call-to-action from Homeland or the CDC. I’d have Lydia Rose do a background check from our end.

“Not surprising,” said Sean. “The girl didn’t matter, the john was a no one, the super was a loser, and the whole thing was tawdry but not sexy, even with all the sexual components. Reporters have gotten jaded. This is too close to other cases scattered around the country, so they can’t sell the novelty. There’s no hook, and they think the other incidents are coincidental. I mean, hell, if they thought there was a conspiracy, then maybe it would get some buzz. But no one thinks that.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah,” he said cautiously. “Maybe.”

“Wait, before we go there, you said there were two causes of death. What else are we talking about?”

“It’s something Doc Jakobs found when he did a full examination of the damaged brain tissue.”

“What did he find?”

“Robots,” said Sean.

I almost smiled. “Say what, now…?”

“Those little tiny ones? You know what I mean. The kind you can only see with a microscope.”

“Nanobots?” I ventured, and I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck twitch.

“Yes. Those are tiny robots, right?”

“They are,” I said, keeping my voice neutral.

“Joe, somebody put nanobots in that girl’s brain.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“The robots are coming! The robots are coming!”

The cries, amplified by the speakers, filled the room and bounced off the walls and collided in the air all around the five hundred people in the seats. No one shot to his feet in panic and tried to flee. No one screamed or fainted dead away.

Instead there was a ripple of polite laughter from some, smiles from everyone else. The tall man on the podium smiled back.

“Or,” he said after a pause, “I should say that they’re already here.”

He turned and spread his arms wide, as if in worship of the images that came and went on the big screen. Machines of every kind, from surgical robots to mechanized drilling platforms to autonomous drones to humanoid figures made from metal and plastic.

“All hail our robot overlords!” cried the man.

More laughter this time, but still not everyone. Not everyone appreciated the jokes or the speaker’s sense of humor. Not everyone knew where this was going. A few of those who did wore the tolerant expressions of people waiting to hear what they already knew. It was a mixed bag, as the audiences of most lectures at the Ethical Society were. Some were the choir here to be preached to, and some were accompanying friends. Some were there because they were curious but not deeply informed on the subject matter; others were there because this was their field and the man who called himself John the Revelator was becoming a voice crying in the technological wilderness — maybe more John the Baptist than the John who wrote the Book of Revelation. Quirky, eccentric, and strange either way. Occasionally offensive but never boring. And his oddball charisma had filled the rest of the seats at the auditorium.

John turned and lowered his arms.

“The technological singularity is regarded as a hypothetical event. One in which, artificially intelligent machines will become so sophisticated that they will make humanity redundant. This is a process that is already well under way. It began when we built computers and wrote software code that allowed robots and other kinds of machines to design and build other robots. It began when we introduced self-learning software into the mix, so that each generation of robots is able to exceed whatever we designed and become something better. Sometimes this evolution follows predicted lines, and sometimes it yields unexpected results. Leaps of self-development that drive these interlocked fields of study forward by orders of magnitude. The machines we make are becoming capable of recursive self-improvement; they are progressively redesigning themselves. Because of the autonomy we’ve designed into them, they are now building smarter and more powerful machines. This is not an aberration. This is what we want them to do, because we’re desperate to reap the benefits of radical technologies.”

His eyes — green as summer grass — roved over the crowd, and there was a small smile on his full lips that never quite went away.

“Alarmists warn us of a runaway effect,” he said quietly. “They say that if we continue to allow autonomous development to progress at its current rate the machines will become so powerful that they may achieve the state of self-awareness. The technological singularity will cease to be a theory and become a fact. And then what?”

The picture on the screen changed and a clip from the movie The Terminator appeared. Armies of robots armed with pulse rifles stalked through an apocalyptic landscape, blasting away at the dwindling band of desperate human resistance fighters.

“Well,” said John, “we all know how that scenario plays out.”

A clip from Terminator 2 showed a playground full of kids and parents being caught in the shock wave of superheated gases as a nuclear device turned them to ash and blew their dust away.

The room was very quiet.

“Or do we know?” asked John. “Is the scenario from a hundred science-fiction movies and a thousand science-fiction novels really predictive of what will happen when the inevitable happens and the robots achieve consciousness? Is there no other possibility? Is there no other result at the end of this long and complex equation?”

There was no sound at all.

John the Revelator smiled at them. “What would happen, do you suppose, if instead of losing control of the technological singularity we embraced it, accepted it, guided it, and became part of it? What if our technological growth explosion is not a pathway to humanity becoming irrelevant but instead was an open door to our own leap forward in evolution. Not human evolution. Not machine evolution. But a shared evolution. Imagine it. Seriously… close your eyes and imagine the possibilities. We are living on a planet that we — collectively we — have overpopulated while failing to provide for the needs of so many. We live on a planet we have raped and brutalized to the point where it is suddenly lashing back at us with droughts and super-storms and blizzards and melting polar ice and with diseases born of imbalance. We share a world where our mishandling of the basic tools of civilized survival — clean water, antibiotics, contraception, fuel, food purity — are failing us because we failed them. We are in a world where we are writing both our eviction notice and our epitaph.”

Behind him the picture changed to show a man and a woman and two children. They were whole and appeared healthy and beautiful. The image morphed slowly so that they were Caucasian and then Asian, black and then Latino, Native American, and on and on, until finally they were clearly mixed-race. It held there, showing people who were gorgeous and healthy and vibrant. Except that they weren’t entirely human. The blue eyes of the woman clicked with mechanical precision, and on the big screen there was a cutaway to show what she saw when she looked down at one of her children. There was a clear image of the child in high definition and full color, but it was framed by data readouts that indicated the child’s age, height, weight, temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, glucose levels, hormone balances, body-fat percentage, blood gases, and a dozen other bits of data. A scale indicated emotional health. A small meter suddenly flashed with an alert saying that the child had a bacterial infection that posed a seventy-percent risk factor. The mother flicked her left wrist quickly from side to side and a section of skin folded back to reveal a small but sophisticated control panel. The mother pressed a few touch keys and the display for the child indicated that nanites had been triggered to release a precise amount of antibiotics into the child’s bloodstream.

Beside the woman, the husband’s smile flickered for a moment and he raised his hand and looked at his palm. The view shifted to show the screen display he saw, and three alerts popped up. One said that he was 3.1 pounds overweight and a list of fat-burning exercises appeared and immediately transferred to his personal calendar, and an alarm was set to remind him to go to the gym. The second alert told him that there was an imbalance in his digestive tract, and a hologram displayed an image of a slice of pepperoni pizza with chili powder on it. A frowning emoji flicked on and off, and a display informed him that a small and carefully regulated dose of famotidine, an H2 receptor antagonist, had been released by nanites. The third alert told him that he had a conference call in fifteen minutes and offered the choice of several business folders for him to peruse.

The picture changed to show a teenage girl walking up to her house carrying schoolbooks. The door scanned her, then its locks clicked open. The camera followed her up the stairs and into her bedroom, where a computer turned itself on and arranged her study notes, homework, and other resources in stacked files on a threefold screen.

Then the image was of a young woman at a bar. As she looked around she got immediate displays of each person, showing age, name, criminal record if any, marital status, occupation, and health warnings. One very handsome man was tagged as having a previous arrest for domestic violence. Another warning said that the very cute guy approaching her had HIV. But the third man was an English teacher — single, no kids, a ninety-seven-percent health rating — who owned his own house and a nice car. Details of his politics, credit score, and social-media platform were included. When that man said hello, the young woman smiled.

There was more. A middle-aged woman went shopping and the displays showed her food content, including fat and salt and additives. A driver slept behind the wheel of his car while it drove him home; his blood-alcohol level clearly showed that he was intoxicated. A military doctor doing emergency surgery on a wounded soldier worked along with a small but sophisticated field robot, and the doctor’s display guided him through a difficult chest incision while showing him all crucial data on the patient, and also linked him to a top cardiothoracic surgeon at the Mayo Clinic. A child being bullied in a schoolyard had alerts going out to teachers and school security, which came running. A woman being assaulted in a parking garage had 911 on the phone while the camera in her eyes ran facial-recognition programs on her assailant and one of her fingernails collected DNA; then a panel in the woman’s wrist opened and hit the man with a small but powerful electric sting.

There were many others.

John stood and watched the people in the audience as they watched the screen.

Finally he said, “And this is just a fraction of personal use once we and the machines become a single and harmonious unit. This is a millionth of a percent of the potential for meaningful, productive, uplifting, and inevitable mutual growth. Business, industry, health care, sports, insurance, banking, exploration, farming, manufacturing, investments, development, climate management, education… well, really, is there any area of our lives that could not be improved?”

The screen faded to silver and the house lights came up.

“The technological singularity is coming,” he said. “The question is whether we resist it, fail ourselves in not keeping pace with it, or embrace it so that we are what evolves.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Jesus H. T. Oliver Christ,” I yelled, sitting up so fast my bare feet slapped against the concrete floor of the deck. Ghost whined sharply, alarmed at my tone. “Nanobots? You’re sure?”

“That’s what Doc Jakobs said, Joe. They’re really tiny, though,” said Sean. “Doc almost missed them during the post, but you know how thorough he is. He doesn’t miss anything.”

“What was the yield?” I asked.

“The what?”

“How many nanites? What was the concentration?”

“Um… not many, I guess…?” he said uncertainly. “I don’t have the number. It’ll be in Doc’s lab report. Does the concentration matter?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Did Doc Jakobs actually say that the nanites were the cause of death?”

“In a way, but the actual cause of death was complicated. There was unusual trauma in the motor cortex and brain stem, and that triggered a myocardial infarction.”

“She had a heart attack?”

“Yes.”

“At fourteen?”

“I know,” said Sean. “I don’t understand the medical parts, and maybe I’m telling it wrong. Something about the nanobots damaging key nerves or nerve centers in the brain. Something like that — Doc can explain it. Oh, and here’s another weird thing. Doc’s sure that the rabies caused her erratic behavior, but there wasn’t the right amount of degenerative damage that he expected to find in someone with the behavioral symptoms. It was like the rabies was dormant and suddenly kicked in at some ultrahigh level. I asked him if the nanobots could have done that, maybe amped the rabies up in some way, but he didn’t know. Frankly, I think he’s afraid to even look into it. He’s afraid to ask around about it, and I don’t blame him.”

“Why’s he afraid to ask?”

“Yeah, well, there’s more,” said Sean slowly. “And maybe I called you as much about that as about the robots. Joe, you see… someone’s been following me.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

“How sure?”

“Very,” said Sean. “But, whoever it is, they know how to tail like a pro and they’re slippery as fuck. I spotted them twice, including on my way back from Dad’s. I called units for backup both times and we tried to box the car, but they slipped us like they could read our minds. We’d coordinate something, and they were gone. After the first time, we used alternate radio channels in case they had a police scanner, but they still outfoxed us. Black SUVs both times. Couldn’t see the plates.”

Black SUVs were one of the vehicles of choice for a lot of government agencies and organized crime. Lots of room for a crew, cargo space, easily armored, and they have smoked windows. Plus, there are a zillion of them on the street.

“Have you checked your phones to see if they have you bugged?”

“I did. The radio in the car is clean, but I’m pretty sure my home phone is tapped. Maybe Dad’s, too. There’s an odd clicking on the line every now and then, though. And, don’t think I’m crazy, but it feels like someone’s listening, you know?”

“Yeah. Shit. What about your cell?”

“I think it’s clean.”

“You think it’s clean?”

“I opened it up and didn’t find a bug.”

I wasn’t worried about someone tapping our call, because we had that covered. Anyone making a call to a DMS phone gets included in a kind of scrambled loop. Anyone listening in on an unauthorized second line or via an electronic bug hears nothing but very loud white noise. Funny thing was, the technology was actually developed by Hugo Vox, the late and unlamented former head of the Seven Kings. It was part of the surveillance and jamming tech he used against us. We borrowed it. Everyone else who had access to the tech is dead. Finders keepers.

Even so, I said, “Listen, Sean, go buy a burner and use that from now on.”

A burner is a disposable cell phone. It’s nearly impossible to trace and can be discarded after use. Great for tourists on vacation, but the primary market seems to be criminals and terrorists. And there’s no way to regulate these phones. In this case, at least, a burner could keep Sean safe.

“Okay,” he said, though he didn’t sound happy about it. He was in that zone between pissed off and scared. “When I found the bugs at the house, I had Ali take the kids to Uncle Jack’s farm for a couple of days. She fought me on that, so I had to tell her a little of what was going on.”

I wished he hadn’t, but I understood why he did. I made a mental note to have one of my guys from the Warehouse swing by Sean’s place to do another sweep, but with the equipment we have. Our new Anteater surveillance-detection system is absolute state of the art, and it was a lot more sensitive than anything the Baltimore PD could ever hope to afford. Again, thanks to Hugo Vox. Oh, yeah, rot in hell.

I decided that I’d also see if someone from the Warehouse wanted to spend a few days in the country watchdogging Sean’s family.

“Joe,” said Sean, “after Doc showed me those nanobots on the microscope I asked him to go through the records to see if there are any other cases similar to Holly, and, there may be as many as four.”

“Jesus.”

He laid it out for me. In the past eleven months there had been four deaths with unusual brain damage. Three girls and a boy, all under the age of sixteen. The deaths happened in different parts of the city and, in the case of the boy, in another town. In each case, there had been some extreme violence but no murders. The cases involved self-mutilation, a savage rape of another teen by one of the victims, stabbings, general mayhem. All very nasty and all very sad. Even though all the victims survived, all the teenage perpetrators died. Heart attacks in two cases, a blood clot in one, and a suicide by leaping out a window.

“Is there a task force on this?” I asked.

“I wish. I pitched that and was shot down by my captain,” Sean complained. “Look… until now, no one has ever really tried to connect the cases and put the pieces together. From any distance they look like isolated instances of junkies freaking out, and there are a lot of cases like that. It wasn’t until Doc looked for incidents involving bites and factors like age and prostitution that he started getting hits. Distant hits, though. I mean, he thinks they’re related and so do I, but we don’t have enough to build a solid case yet. I’m trying to determine disposition of bodies right now, but my guess is they’ve been sent back to families, and that means different jurisdictions and a lot of ‘I don’t give a shit’ on the part of local law, local hospitals, and the families of the kids. You know how it is with the fringe dwellers.”

“Sean,” I said, “you said that Kya was a prostitute. What do you know about her pimp?”

“Not much. There’s a thin lead I’ve been following that seems to be tied to maybe the Russians. They run a lot of girls in this part of Maryland. So far I’ve hit a lot of dead ends.”

“Who all have you told about this?” I asked.

“Just my captain, Dad, and Ali.”

“Keep it that way.”

“But—”

“Dad was right,” I said. “This does sound like my kind of thing. Or, maybe it is. I’ll have to look at it and then make a judgment call. Sean, can you get your hands on samples of the blood and brain tissue with the nanites in them? I mean can you do it without it showing up on the chain of evidence log?”

“I… uh, well, sure. I’d have to tell Doc Jakobs why, though.”

“Don’t call him. No more phones. Assume his place is bugged, too. Go and hand him a note explaining the basics. Burn the note afterward and flush the ashes. Someone will be in touch to collect the samples.”

“Who?”

“No one you know, but he’ll have a message from me. It’ll be the name of the guy who got me to read that book. You know what I mean?”

He thought about it for a moment. “Sure.”

When I was in ninth grade, I was starting to log a lot of hours in detention because of fighting with other kids and making smart-ass comments to teachers. I know, you’re shocked. Joe Ledger fighting and being a smart-ass? Who’d have thought? Anyway, the teacher running detention was big on reading. He made a deal with whoever was on the bench: we could read one of the books he had in his office and then take a quiz based on the chapters we swore we’d read. If we scored well, proving that we’d actually done the reading, we could get out early. While I was there, I grabbed a book called Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. It was a little young for my reading level, but it had a good story. Kid lost in the woods who was fighting for survival and all he had was a hatchet. I ripped through that in five detention sessions. It was my favorite book for a long time, and it engendered within me a love of books. Plus, it was a kick-ass story. I read a lot of other books while polishing that bench with my teenage ass, but I read Hatchet three times. And I gave a new copy to Sean for Christmas that year.

“Don’t ask the pickup guy too many questions, because he’ll stonewall you. Rules of the game,” I said.

“What do I do after that?”

“Sit tight and keep your eyes open. I’ll be there by tomorrow morning.”

“Thanks, Joe.” There was a heartbreaking amount of relief in his voice. He really was scared. So was I.

I was also really fucking pissed off. Five dead kids, someone playing with nanotech, the possibility of some kind of rabies outbreak, and now someone ghosting my brother? Yeah, I was planning on having a meaningful conversation with someone. It would be a chat I’d enjoy more than they would.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Sarah Schoeffel didn’t like being grilled by Congress. Not even by a small closed-door panel. She felt very much like a witness giving testimony while already strapped to the electric chair. The subcommittee’s control over funding for her department was the hand on the switch, and the longer these hearings went on the more that hand seemed to twitch.

“You’re telling us,” said Senator Diaz from Florida, “that the cybersecurity of this nation’s largest banks is not secure?”

“That is correct,” said Schoeffel.

“And you’re saying that the banks might not recover the money that has so far been taken from all those accounts?”

“I would say that there is a very small chance any of those funds can be recovered, Senator. The thefts were done quietly by highly skilled computer hackers who were able to disable the alert systems written into the software. The money was gone days before anyone knew about it, and it’s likely that it has since been rerouted to a great many accounts in the Caymans, Panama, and elsewhere. Possibly even laundered electronically and funneled back into domestic banks through falsified income and profit reports of shell companies.”

Schoeffel felt the heat of nine sets of eyes. She knew that she didn’t have a friend in the room. Not the seven members of the cyberterrorism panel and not the two congressmen who were guests from the Banking and the Finance Committee. No one wanted to hear the truth, although they kept asking pointed questions like that one. It was clear that they wanted to be mollified, comforted, maybe even lied to, but Schoeffel was here to tell the truth. Painful and dangerous truths, but truths nonetheless.

“How is this even possible?” asked Albertson, the representative from Ohio.

Schoeffel spread her hands. “Cybersecurity is only as good as the latest upgrade. Once the new security software is in place, it’s only a matter of time before a hacker assesses it and cracks it. It’s like a game, and there are a lot of black hats out there who—”

Goines raised a hand. “I’m a little fuzzy on that. You keep using terms like ‘black hat’ and ‘gray hat.’ What, exactly, does that mean?”

“It’s pretty straightforward,” said Schoeffel. “Black-hat hackers are criminals who violate computer security for personal gain, such as stealing credit-card information, personal-data harvesting, identity theft, corporate espionage, and international espionage. The Chinese Ghost-Net is a black hat because they’re trying to crack the security on our banks as well as the power grids. These black hats run the gamut from simple criminals to terrorists. And their holy grail is what we call a ‘zero day’ vulnerability, which is where they take advantage of a security vulnerability on the same day that the vulnerability becomes generally known. There are zero days between the time the vulnerability is discovered and the first attack, hence the name.”

The congressmen and women nodded.

“White-hat hackers are the good guys,” continued Schoeffel. “Call them ‘ethical hackers,’ if you will. They’re the ones who build our defenses against the black hats and wage a very serious war with them, and it is equal parts attack and defense. We employ many of them to try and hack our own systems so that vulnerabilities can be identified and addressed. Many businesses employ them, too. White-hat hackers use their understanding of complex computer-security programs to compromise the organization’s systems, just as a black-hat hacker would. However, instead of using this access to steal or vandalize these systems the white hats report back to the organization and inform it of how they gained access, allowing the organization to improve its defenses. This is called ‘penetration testing,’ and it’s an extremely valuable tool. Homeland and the Department of Defense employ hundreds of white hats.”

“And the gray hats?” asked Goines.

“Well, let’s face it,” said Schoeffel. “How much of the world is black or white? An argument can be made that in business, as in politics, most of what happens falls into some kind of gray area. And so a gray-hat hacker falls somewhere between a black hat and a white hat. These hackers don’t necessarily work for their own personal gain or to wreak anarchistic damage, and though technically they may commit crimes, arguably they do so for ethical reasons.”

“‘Ethical’?” echoed Albertson.

“From their perspective, sure. We’ve had gray hats hack their way into government systems, including NORAD and other highly sensitive and supposedly closed systems, in order to raise awareness of possible vulnerabilities. Sometimes they’ll hack into a piece of expensive commercial software, or work their way into something like an online pay service like PayPal and then contact the companies in order to alert them before a black hat can do real damage. Some of them consider themselves watchdogs, or cybervigilantes, or superheroes. And there are a few gray hats who hack into databases in order to act as whistle-blowers for perceived crimes. We saw that with the Panama Papers a few years ago, and with Snowden before that.” Schoeffel paused and assessed the panel, pleased to see that no one’s eyes had glazed over, and that they were all following her. “The simple truth is that there is no such thing as a perfect system. There are always flaws and code errors and bugs. These exist because computer code is written by human beings and perfection of function, while a goal, is probably not attainable. People will always make mistakes. Knowing this, hackers look for those errors and exploit them. The more attractive the target — or the benefits of hacking that target, such as with banks — the more aggressive and determined the attacks are.”

“What can we do to stop it?” asked Albertson.

Schoeffel had to resist the impulse to shrug. She took a sip of water instead and wished there were something stronger in the glass. A tall vodka and tonic with cherries and lime would smooth the edges of her eroded nerves.

“Well, one thing we can do is up the funding for the WhiteHat counterintrusion program being developed by DARPA,” she said.

“That’s one of Major Schellinger’s programs?” mused Goines. “It’s very expensive.”

“It’s a lot less expensive than the alternative,” said Schoeffel. “We need to seriously up our game, because hackers are constantly upping theirs. Think of it as a guerrilla war. The hackers are the mobile resistance and—”

“They’re terrorists,” snapped Albertson, emphasizing his point by slapping his palm down on the table. It was one of his signature gestures, and Schoeffel suspected that he grooved on seeing people flinch. Probably equated a natural reaction to a sudden noise with his listeners reacting to him.

“Okay, sure, then let’s change the metaphor,” said Schoeffel with as much patience as she could shove into her tone. “Hackers are terrorists, which means they’re small, covert, and can blend into ordinary society. They are not an enemy state, and they don’t have a ZIP code. Computers are portable, which means that anywhere a hacker sits — a table at Starbucks, a couch, a seat on the B train — he’s able to turn into his command center. The hackers’ weapons are their computers, Internet access, data, and their own personal skills. When they launch an attack, there is no smoking gun, no explosion to draw the eye. They can sit next to you in a cybercafé, use a portable device to remote-hack your cell phone or the chip in your Visa card and go online to destroy your life. They can use public utilities and free Wi-Fi as tunnels to get into the mainframes owned by big business, banking, credit-card companies, research laboratories, government agencies, and the military. Our current mechanism for countering these attacks is good, but, because of the natural bureaucracy and the size of our government, adaptive change is correspondingly slow. An elephant can defeat a lion in a straight fight, but the lion is faster and more agile and can often inflict damage and escape. When it returns, it targets the young and weak in the elephant’s herd, inflicting a different and perhaps deeper kind of damage.”

“How bad can this get?” asked Goines.

Schoeffel tried not to wince at the naïveté of the question, especially coming from someone on this committee. “We’ve already seen glimpses of how bad it could get. The cyber-terrorist Artemisia Bliss, who called herself Mother Night, created a network of cyberhackers. The Seven Kings organization used computer viruses to compromise the software systems of our entire military. They hacked the GPS on Air Force One and nearly plunged this country into chaos.”

“You’re talking about what?” asked Goines. “A cyberversion of 9/11?”

Schoeffel shook her head very slowly. “No, sir, I am talking about something much, much worse. You see, every time a cyberterrorist does something that draws the eye of the public and gets big media coverage — as with Mother Night, the Seven Kings, and ISIL last year with the attempt to use drones to release smallpox — the fact that they’re stopped isn’t enough. A hacker, a planner, a terrorist, or anyone else gets to look at the nature of the attack, evaluate the successes and defeats, see how the attack was ultimately stopped, and use all of that as a teachable moment. So much can be learned from those cases. So much can be deduced and induced and inferred. It’s no different from generals studying the accounts of previous campaigns when planning a battle. There is as much to learn about why Napoleon lost at Waterloo as there is about how Wellington won.”

There was utter silence in the room.

Schoeffel said, “I am not afraid of a cyber-9/11, ladies and gentlemen. I am afraid of a cyber-apocalypse.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Before I did anything else, I called Sam Imura at the Warehouse and brought him up to speed.

“I’ll take care of it, Joe,” he said. “But… you’re sure this wasn’t Seif al Din?”

“It’s your town, Sam. Have you had a zombie apocalypse lately?”

“Point taken. I’m just having a hard time processing the thought of a skinny fourteen-year-old girl brutalizing two grown men. Even if she had rabies.”

“Which is why I want our people looking at the tox screens and taking a real damn close look at those nanites.”

“Do you really believe there are nanites in the girl’s blood?”

“Doc Jakobs is old, and he’s a well-known conspiracy theorist,” I said. “He once told me that he believes reptilian aliens are controlling both parties in Congress. So… you tell me.”

Sam snorted. “He may be right about Congress.”

“That’s what I told him. Point is he’s a bit daffy.”

“Does that mean you’re not opening a file on this yet?”

“Nope. It’s weird and nasty, but it doesn’t have DMS painted on the fender. Not until we know for sure that what Doc Jakobs told Sean is accurate. For now, I’m calling it a 70/30 in favor of Doc being too old and crazy.”

“Someone’s bugging your brother’s house, though.”

“Which is why I’m going out there,” I said. “I don’t know that the bugs are part of this case. Sean has worked a lot of homicides tied to organized crime, and he’s done some counter-terrorism task-force stuff, so those bugs could be unconnected to the girl. I don’t want to jump the gun, but no matter what’s happening, this is freaky by Sean’s standards. So until I know for sure that this is anything more than a slightly weirder day on the job for a homicide cop in the big, bad city, I’m not making my visit official.”

“Understood.”

What neither of us said aloud was that the DMS had bungled so many cases during the Kill Switch debacle that all of us had lost some faith in our judgment. We were all suffering different levels of PTSD. The fear there is that damage of that sort can create hesitation, and in our line of work hesitation is nearly always fatal. Or it can make you jump at shadows.

And you wonder why I drink?

My next call was to Nikki, a senior analyst in our computer department. I gave her info on Sean and the names of the dead kids and told her to find me a connection. She ran it through MindReader and called me back in less than twenty minutes.

“I’m getting hits,” said Nikki, “but no pattern. What do you want first?”

“Nanites.”

“Nothing there. They’re not mentioned in the official report Dr. Jakobs filed, and there are no other reports related to Baltimore, local prostitution, unexplained deaths of children, or rabies outbreaks. It might be incidental.”

“How so?”

“There are a lot of groups using nanite swarms these days, Joe. Ever since the Zika virus mutated, they’ve been spraying tons of them. They carry chemical and biological agents that sterilize the female mosquitoes so they can’t breed.”

“We’re using nanites for this?” I asked, appalled.

“Sure. All over the world. There’s a chance the girl was in an area where they were spraying and inhaled some of the nanites. Joe, I’m pretty sure Bug forwarded a report to you.”

“When?”

“Like… two years ago?”

“Shit.” There were a lot of reports forwarded to me every day. I skimmed most of them because we’re talking hundreds of pages, either in print or online. If I was in the field, then all of that data piled up. There was no earthly way for me to keep ahead of it all. “Which is why I love you, Nikki,” I said. “You always help me with my homework. Tell me, would those Zika nanites be in her brain?”

“Well… no, probably not. We can ask Dr. Acharya when he gets back from the DARPA camp.”

“Look,” I said, “is there any chance those nanites were carrying rabies?”

“There’s absolutely nothing like that in the files. Nanites don’t bite. They’re really, really, really tiny.”

“Okay. What about rabies by itself? Any new outbreaks?”

“Well, sure, though not that much. There was a report on that, too.”

“Which I clearly have not read,” I told her.

She sighed audibly. “According to the CDC, incidents of rabies here in America are in decline. There were only two or three cases reported annually and only forty cases diagnosed in the United States between 2003 and early last year, twelve of which were cases where the person contracted the disease while outside the U.S. There’s been a definite increase in the last eighteen months, but it’s still such a low number that it hasn’t gotten much national press.”

“What’s causing the change?” I asked.

“I’ll get in touch with Dr. Cmar. He’ll know.”

John Cmar was the director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, but he was also a senior consultant for the Bughunters, a covert rapid-response CDC group funded by the DMS. He’s one of Mr. Church’s “friends in the industry.”

“Keep me posted on that,” I said.

“Okay, but I’m checking other instances of rabies and I’m seeing increased incidents in India, and in West Africa, Mexico, and Brazil. Pretty much the poorest parts of the Third World, but there are always disease outbreaks there. I’m not seeing anything that ties into what happened in Baltimore, though. I mean, rabies shows up a lot in animals, mostly skunks in the middle part of the country and parts of California, foxes down in Texas, and raccoons on the East Coast. Some bats, and like that. Dogs with rabies are really rare because of vaccinations. We can’t know how the girl contracted it until we get the samples and have our own lab run tests, and even then we might not know for sure. It’s so weird for city kids. I mean, exposure to nanites from mosquito spraying is a hundred times more likely, and even that’s odd.”

“Okay. What about the hotel where Holly died? Any red flags in its health-code violations?”

“No, nothing in particular. I found some deep background stuff on the hotel management but no actionable evidence,” Nikki said. “Nothing you can use in court. But there’s this — all the kids Sean told you about died in hotels or motels, and although none of them are owned by the same people, there is a connection. They all use the same linen and vending services, which are owned by a Baltimore businessman named Vsevolod Rejenko, known as Vee.”

“Russian mob?” I asked.

“Vee’s Czech. Got his U.S. citizenship six years ago. Been looked at a couple of times for possible racketeering, but nothing came of it. I have a bunch of searches active on MindReader, though.”

Old and cranky as it was, MindReader was still a pretty spiffy computer system. It has two primary functions. The first is that it has a superintrusion software package that allows it to invade other computers and, in doing so, rewrite the target’s own software in order to erase all traces of the invasion. It’s a ghost that can walk through walls. The second thing it does is serve as a master pattern-recognition-analysis computer. Because MindReader can essentially steal information from the databases of all other law-enforcement agencies, it can then collate that data and look for patterns no one else sees. If Mr. Church trusted the motives and ethics of the heads of other law-enforcement agencies, he’d probably share MindReader. But there are a lot of complete jackasses out there, even among the good guys. Bug runs MindReader, with Nikki and Yoda as his right and left hands. They are supernerd geniuses who had all been frustrated idealists trying to fight the stupidity of the “system” by acting as anarchist hackers of one kind or another. Then Church stepped into their lives and gave them the chance to do real good for the world, and to do it by using the world’s most sophisticated and powerful computer.

“This Vee character,” I said. “See if he still has active ties in the Czech Republic?”

“Because of Prague, you mean? I thought of that. Vee recruits some of his staff from there, but that’s all that came up.”

“Go deeper. See if he has any ties to the technologies industry in general, and any connection at all to nanotechnology in particular.”

“On it,” she said, and ended the call.

My next call was to Lydia Rose, to book me on the first available flight to Baltimore.

INTERLUDE THREE

The clerk was reading the paper while an old anime of Sailor Moon played on every screen in the shop. When the bell above the door rang, he looked up to see a middle-aged businessman come in. The man looked sweaty and nervous, the way a lot of customers did. That was useful. It spoke to a type. This man was not here to buy a flat-screen TV or a videogame console. He was too old, for one thing, and his clothes were too good. He didn’t have the slacker look, or even the look of the young worker drone who decompressed after his shift by escaping into alien worlds.

This man was fiftysomething, with a very expensive suit, top-quality shoes, and a leather briefcase that cost more than some of the electronics in the shop. The clerk figured him for an executive in one of the mid to large companies. Probably an oil company, or something related to petroleum, because he seemed to be getting a lot of those kinds of customers in here lately. This man would have at least one very expensive car, a big house, a pretty wife, a couple of grown kids, no dog. He didn’t look like the dog-owner type. Koi, maybe.

The clerk stood and gave a very slight bow, which is something he only did for certain customers. The store was empty, and the clerk touched a button beneath the counter that switched the OPEN sign to BACK IN FIVE MINUTES, and that also engaged the door lock. The man heard the click and flinched.

The clerk smiled, even more convinced now.

“How may I help you, sir?” he asked.

The man didn’t immediately approach the counter but instead stood where he was, his pink tongue licking nervously at his lips.

“I, um,” began the man. He cut quick looks around the empty shop and then tried again. “I would, um… I mean, do you carry any, um, software.”

There it was. The code word. It not only identified why the man was here but also who sent him. Each of the account managers associated with this shop used a different word. Software, shareware, spyware. Like that. More than three dozen possible keywords. The trick was to ensure that it wasn’t a random word thrown out by an actual customer of an electronics store.

“For installation or download, sir?”

The man swallowed and blinked. He had sweat in his eyes and on his upper lip. “I prefer to, um, download it.”

“Of course, sir, please come this way. We have an excellent selection of programs.” He held out a hand to invite the man to step up to the counter. Then the clerk went behind the counter and tapped on the keys of a keyboard mounted beneath it. The front-window glass immediately darkened, which was a nice little trick of holography. The glass had some reflective qualities, and small projectors mounted amid the ceiling track lights splashed a continuous video loop of the shop as it looked when closed and darkened. The image was 3-D enough so that if someone outside shifted for a better look inside the image would adjust to maintain a normal view. It was quite effective, and was only one of several dozen high-tech features built into the store’s security. It was a complicated world, as the clerk well knew, and you could never be too careful.

Once they were totally free from prying eyes, the clerk tapped another key, which turned the clear glass countertop into an opaque video screen. The businessman grunted in surprise, but bent closer to watch as the clerk brought up an illustrated menu. The pictures were of anime movies featuring young women in outlandish costumes, many with oversized swords or ray guns. The costumes ranged from tight-fitting sequined gowns to period costumes from the days of the Samurai to schoolgirl uniforms. Dozens of choices, and, with a wave of his hand, the clerk indicated how the customer could scroll down to see even more offerings. It was not a touch screen, because touch screens leave fingerprints.

“We have so many choices,” said the clerk. “Did you have something particular in mind? Vintage, perhaps? Or a costume drama…?”

The customer stopped scrolling and his trembling fingers hovered above an image of a child sitting on a tree stump, a stuffed unicorn doll tucked under her arm and her pouting lips tight around the thumb she was sucking. Without speaking, the man looked up at the clerk.

“An excellent choice, sir,” said the clerk. “And you’re in luck, because we received a brand-new shipment only this morning.”

“N-new? How… um… new?”

“Absolutely untouched, sir. You will be the very first customer for this item.”

The businessman licked his lips again. “You’re telling me the truth?”

The clerk smiled. “We take great pride in providing only the best items for your entertainment needs. We are second to none, as I trust you’ve been told.”

He knew that this was exactly what the account manager had said to this man. The sales pitch was very good, based on the results of several studies of sales language and psychological manipulation modeled on personality subtypes. Sell the customer what he wants in the way that makes him feel comfortable, empowered, and satisfied. Sell it in the language of his desire. That was how the regional director always put it.

The businessman looked up sharply, and even though he was still sweating and nervous, there was a fire in his eyes. The man now knew without doubt where he was, what he was doing, and whom he was dealing with. From here out, he would be less tentative as he got closer to what he craved. He would feel more powerful, but the clerk knew that this only made him more manageable; it would be like leading a stallion into a breeding pen. The horse was headstrong, but his needs dictated everything.

“How much is this… item?” demanded the businessman.

The clerk tapped a key that brought up an amount in yen. Most men would stagger back from that figure, but the businessman nodded. He produced a card and tapped the corner with the chip to the spot indicated by the clerk. There was a soft bing, and the money was instantly debited. The clerk noted that the card had no name on it and no numbers. The man had a special account somewhere just for this sort of thing. It meant that he was a true player, and if things went well for him today he would be a repeat customer. The percentage of the fee that the clerk would have to split with the account manager was delicious. Enough to buy a new scooter and maybe take his girlfriend out to a four-star restaurant. Very few sales hit numbers like this. He kept his pleasure off his face, though.

Instead, he cleared the screen, stepped back, and indicated the passageway to the back room, then hurried forward to open the door for the businessman. The clerk wore an expensive electronic watch, and he held the face to the doorknob so that the scanner built into the knob could read the code and release the lock. Key cards were so last year.

The clerk opened the door and ushered his client inside, then closed and locked the door behind him. Now that the store was empty, a whole battery of sensors came online to monitor the store, the street outside, the alley behind the building, and the roof. Nothing was left to chance.

The rooms behind the store were small but luxurious, with expensive furniture, indirect lighting, good carpets, and rich tapestries on the wall. The rooms were arranged in a kind of maze that prevented customers from ever encountering one another. There was no allowance for awkward moments. Not here. Never here.

The clerk led the businessman to a room near the end of a convoluted hallway, and by the time they arrived he was sure the customer would never be able to find his way out. Not without help. That was a tipping opportunity, especially if the man was satisfied with services provided.

The customers who came here were very good tippers. And although management took its cut, the clerk could clear two or three hundred yen each week. Some weeks it was as high as a thousand. The clerk had paid off most of his student loans so far.

“Here we are, sir,” he said as he stopped beside a door covered in rich, dark-red leather. He waved his watch across a sensor, and the door clicked open and swung inward to reveal a very well-appointed bedroom. The bed was in the European style, with an ornate headboard, a rich brocade comforter, and many embroidered pillows. A lamp set to low light stood on a hand-carved wooden table, and beside that was a long rack of toys covered with a silk draping. Each of the many whips, chains, handcuffs, dildos, leather masks, and other items was brand-new and of the highest quality. The girl who stood beside the bed had her hands folded in front of her, head bowed, eyes politely lowered, long fall of black hair hanging below her shoulders. She was dressed in a school uniform of the kind worn by first graders in the better private schools.

The clerk bowed again as the customer stepped into the room. Then he triggered the sensor to automatically close and lock the door. He straightened, sighed, and cracked the tension out of his neck. The room — like all the rooms here — was completely soundproof. That was fine with him. He didn’t like to hear the screams. After all, he wasn’t kinky. He only worked there.

He went to the restroom and then walked through the twisting and turning hallway back to the door that opened before him and led to the store. Once he was back behind the counter, he tapped the keys that changed the sign back to OPEN and turned the opaque window back to clear glass.

And that’s when the door exploded inward, showering him with jagged splinters. He covered his face with one hand as he spun away and used the other to reach for an alarm button. He hit the button at the exact moment that a hard rubber bullet struck him in the shoulder, shattering his scapula and sending him crashing into the back wall. Suddenly the room was filled with bodies as what seemed like dozens of police poured in through the shattered door, shouting, shoving him, beating him to the floor. Alarms rang throughout the building, and the clerk knew that the rest of the staff would be trying to rescue as many customers as possible.

“Through here!” yelled a voice, and a husky cop stepped to the back door and swung a heavy breaching tool. Once, twice, and on the third shot the door lock tore itself out of the frame. The officers ran inside, guns drawn, faces set into fierce growls.

“Where are they?” demanded a hatchet-faced man who wore a detective’s shield on a chain around his neck.

“I… don’t…” began the clerk, but the detective struck him a savage blow across the mouth. Blood spattered the corner of the counter, and the clerk screamed.

“Get him up,” demanded the detective, and two officers grabbed the clerk and hauled him to his feet, which made the broken bones in his shoulder grate together. The clerk screamed, but the detective punched him in the stomach with such shocking force that the scream was cut short. The clerk felt his lungs locking up and fireworks seemed to burst around him. Then the detective took a fistful of his hair and raised his head, leaning so close that when he spoke his hot spit struck the clerk’s face. “Where are the kids?”

The clerk shook his head, blood dribbling from between his mashed lips. “No… kids…” he gasped.

The detective looked as if he wanted to hit him again, but then someone shouted from inside the building.

“Sir! You need to come here,” yelled an officer.

The detective turned to go, but over his shoulder growled, “Bring him.”

The two officers holding the clerk dragged him through the doorway and followed the detective down the winding corridors. All the doors on either side of the hall were open, their locks smashed and the frames splintered. All of them were empty now. The businessman had been the only client on the premises at the moment. Two other members of the staff knelt on the floor, cuffed hands behind their backs, under the guard of furious-looking cops. Both of the staff members were bruised and bleeding.

“Please,” begged the clerk, “there’s no kids here. Believe me.”

“Shut your mouth or lose your teeth,” snarled the detective.

They arrived at the next to the last door in the hall, which stood open, half torn from its hinges. The detective went in first, and the cops flung the clerk onto the floor next to the businessman, who was sprawled and semiconscious, his face pulped from a savage beating.

The room was silent.

The detective approached the bed, on which a small, naked figure lay sprawled, wrists and ankles tightly bound by padded cuffs. The last remnants of a school uniform clung to the bare skin. The girl’s mouth was open, the lips parted in a small “Oh” of apparent surprise. Her eyes were open and stared sightlessly at the ceiling. The thin chest did not rise and fall, and her limbs were utterly slack.

The detective bent over her, staring in absolute horror at the tiny body. Then he closed his eyes and sagged back, reaching for the bedpost for balance. He remained like that for a long, long moment during which the clerk didn’t dare breathe.

Then the detective opened his eyes and turned slowly toward the clerk. Everyone else turned with him, looking at the young man on the floor. The weight of their hatred was crushing.

“You’ll burn for this,” said the detective. “I swear to you, you’ll burn.”

The clerk was crying now, tears running from his eyes, snot bubbling from his nose. “No… please… it’s not what you think.…”

The detective rushed at him and kicked him in the stomach. Once… then again. Each blow doing awful damage.

“Stop!” screamed the clerk. “She’s not dead.”

The detective stopped, foot raised for a third kick. Doubt clouded his face and he looked from his target over his shoulder at the girl.

Very slowly the girl turned her head toward him. She blinked slowly and smiled at the detective.

“System failure,” she said. “Please reset.”

She began to blink rapidly and repeated the phrase.

Over and over.

The clerk and the businessman were arrested, but within two hours they were released. Lawyers descended in flocks on the police station. Threats — very credible threats — were made about the lawsuits that would be filed. Apologies would be required at every level of the police administration, because the businessman was very important. He was a senior vice president of a petroleum and metals conglomerate with holdings all across Japan that employed twenty-eight thousand people. Jobs would be lost within the police department. Heads would roll.

Or so all the lawyers threatened.

The dynamic of that legal barrage faltered a day later, when Mr. Yohji Watanabe, back home in the safety of his home, collapsed in the shower of his palatial estate on the outskirts of Tokyo. His wife heard him fall and came running, but she stopped in the bathroom doorway, her horror mounting higher than her need to see to her husband. He lay there naked, tangled in the plastic curtains, bleeding from his nose and mouth, from his ears and eyes, from his rectum and the tip of his penis. The shower water had turned the blood pink and washed it all away before Mrs. Watanabe even stopped screaming.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Mademoiselle,” said the Concierge, “you are looking well.”

He was a very good liar, but they both knew that he was lying. Zephyr Bain glared at him from the big screen in the little Frenchman’s office. Now they were both in wheelchairs. She looked like a scarecrow covered with sun-withered leather. It was hard to believe that she was only in her mid-thirties. She looked ninety. No, thought the Concierge, she looks dead.

Zephyr didn’t acknowledge his compliment. “Is it done?”

“Oui,” he said. “Prague was a huge success. More than we could have hoped for.”

“And Mexico?”

He shrugged. “The government there refused the Deacon’s offer and instead went with Sigma Force. Exactly as John predicted they would.”

“Good,” she said, and there was much more life in the ferocity of her tone and in the flash of her eyes than in the shrunken husk of her body.

“We are exactly on schedule,” said the Concierge.

Zephyr leaned forward, and her eyes seemed to flash with green fire. “Tell me that it’s going to work.”

The Concierge nodded. “I promise you, mademoiselle, it is all going to work.”

Her eyes shifted to look past him. He knew what she was looking at. His house had been heavily reinforced in the past eleven weeks, and she could see the heavy steel shutters on the windows. He had done everything to make his estate impregnable. Robotic sentries outside, armed drones in the trees, mines placed under the turf all across the lawn. Inside the house, the Calpurnia AI system oversaw every detail of security and would respond with escalating aggression against any attempt to break in. If Havoc ran as expected, that would be inevitable. There would be riots in the streets. Everywhere. For as long as the rioters lived. Call it eight months, according to the most recent computer models. He had food and supplies for two years. The Concierge always paid attention to detail, and, with what was coming, those details were the only thing that would keep him alive. The entire house had even been constructed out of flame-resistant materials in case this part of the world caught fire.

Which was so very likely.

He smiled up at Zephyr Bain. “When would you like to start the clock?”

She thought about it.

“Soon,” she said.

“How soon, mademoiselle?”

“As soon as we break Joe Ledger’s heart,” said Zephyr. “But be very clear on this, my friend. He dies before I do.”

The Concierge nodded. “Oh, of course. That was always my plan.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

“A cyberapocalypse?” said Goines, smiling faintly. “Isn’t that a bit of a reach, Deputy Director? I know that you need to defend your funding and budget requests, but let’s not descend to grandiosity.”

Sarah Schoeffel fixed the senator with a hard, unflinching stare. “I am not given much to exaggeration. I used that word with precision. Allow me to explain.”

“Please do,” said Albertson, though he wore an expression of even greater skepticism than Goines.

“It is within the skill set of modern hackers to launch a coordinated deep-penetration attack on American banks. Going solely on established actions by black hats and gray hats over the last ten years, we know that they can hack into the mainframes of the banking system to destroy records, drain accounts, and freeze the response networks needed to stop loss or prevent further damage. In 2008, the Federal Reserve invoked a number of what were called “unusual and exigent circumstances” to lend billions of dollars to banks that had been damaged during the credit meltdown. We know, from evidence collected by the NSA and the Department of Military Sciences, that the Seven Kings were responsible for a large portion of that financial catastrophe. Billions were looted, and let me remind you that more than a hundred billion has never been recovered. Now go back to September 11, 2001, and look at what happened to stocks and banking. During the flight to safety before trading was suspended, billions were moved and a great number of people profited hugely. At first, we thought it was a typical crisis-induced trading frenzy, but the DMS proved without a shadow of a doubt that the Seven Kings were not only profiting from the panic but had provided funding and support to Al Qaeda to guarantee that the planes would hit the towers. Those planes were physical, but they were in support of theft of funds on a grand scale, because Hugo Vox had thousands of traders waiting to exploit the event.”

The congressional panel watched, silent and calculating.

“Cyberattackers are aware that the damage they inflict is massive and isn’t easily repaired. Federal deposit insurance only applies if a bank fails, not if hackers drain the accounts. In the event of a cyberattack that drained funds, banks would have to tap their own reserves and then their own private insurance. If the attack is large enough, there wouldn’t be enough to cover all claims. Which means the banks fail and the avalanche buries millions of American businesses and private citizens.”

Not a sound in the room.

“Cyberhackers come in all shapes and sizes,” continued Schoeffel. “One-man operations all the way up to nation-states that want to do damage to the U.S. economy. Our status as the premier superpower rests on the dome of an economy that has become increasingly fragile. Cybercriminals of all stripes continue to attack and exploit our online financial and market systems, particularly those that interface with the Internet. The Automated Clearing House systems, or ACH, card payments, and market trades are all vulnerable to these kinds of attacks. The attacks happen at all levels, from the individual citizen with an ATM card and an online banking login to the biggest banks on Wall Street. When it comes to cybercrime, no one is too small a target to bother with or so big that they can withstand any attack. A scenario of perfect security does not exist. Fraudulent monetary transfers and counterfeiting of stored value cards are the most common attacks. We in the FBI are currently investigating over five hundred reported cases of corporate-account takeovers in which cybercriminals have initiated unauthorized ACH and wire transfers from the bank accounts of U.S. businesses. Ten years ago, that kind of theft was in the range of two hundred and twenty-five million. Last year it was eighteen billion that we can absolutely prove, and it’s entirely possible the number is much higher.”

“You have documentation on this?” asked Goines.

“Reams of it,” said Schoeffel. “I wish proof wasn’t as easy to come by, but it’s everywhere. They are stealing data, they are destroying systems, and they are clearly learning how to effectively and easily disrupt critical financial, military, communications, power, and medical services. Think about that, and then see if my phrasing doesn’t fit.”

Even then, the members of the panel looked unconvinced. Schoeffel wanted to hit Goines.

“The bureau already has substantial funding to combat these threats,” said Albertson.

“We have funding adequate for responding to the threats perceived when the last budget proposal was approved,” said Schoeffel. “The cyberworld changes faster than the budget process, and it’s capable of unpredictable exponential growth. I want us to get way ahead of it. Besides, one agency cannot combat the threat alone. The National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force, which the bureau heads, coordinates with twenty law-enforcement agencies and with the intelligence community — the IC — which includes the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Security Agency. We have cyberstaff in other IC agencies through joint duty, but that is a very large bureaucracy. It’s not nearly nimble enough. We need to create smaller strike teams, specialized groups that can react quickly, turn on a dime, go where the fight is without having to carry the whole infrastructure with them. That is what I want you to fund. Teams like that will, we hope, be able to counter or quickly respond to zero point attacks like the Chinese Titan Rain assaults in 2003, the attacks during the 2011 Paris G2 Summit, and the monstrous 2015 hacking of the Office of Personnel Management, where information — including Social Security numbers — on eighteen million Americans was stolen. Sadly, the list of serious cybercrimes is so long that we would be here for a week, and that alone is frightening.”

“But hardly apocalyptic,” said Goines dryly. Some of the others on the panel chuckled. Schoeffel kept her temper, though.

“Senator,” she said evenly, “it’s fair to say that the nation-states that are at odds with our country are unlikely to declare open war. Even the hard-line Russians led by Putin aren’t likely to remake that country in the image of the Cold War — era Soviet monster, and China, though a growing threat, may be able to put more men in the field, but they know that any war they might fight with us would be between ships and submarines, and we have a serious advantage there. North Korea can’t even see the subs we have off their coast. But every single one of them, and the next forty antagonistic nations behind them, can engage in computer warfare on nearly equal ground with us. We saw that in 2009, when hackers breached the security at Google’s Chinese headquarters to gain access to corporate servers and steal intellectual property. Part of that theft was to obtain access to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists. Since then there have been several significant hack attacks of major corporations and government agencies, including private power companies, medical research, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes for Health, FEMA, NASA, hospitals, communications and cellular-phone companies, and more. In 1990, Kevin Poulsen managed to use his computer to block phone lines so that he could rig a contest to win a Porsche. In 1998, Iraqi hackers launched a cyberattack that allowed them to temporarily seize control of over five hundred government and private-industry systems. And let’s not forget that in 1999 a fifteen-year-old boy, Jonathan James, hacked into the computers of a division of the Department of Defense and installed a back door on its servers that allowed him to intercept thousands of internal emails from different government organizations, including ones containing usernames and passwords for various military computers. Hackers have become steadily smarter and more resourceful since then. Iran’s Operation Cleaver is a perfect example; it allowed that government to target critical infrastructure organizations worldwide and yet maintain official deniability. That is the most insidious part of it, too, because they can come at us in ways that are actually more destructive than bullets or cluster bombs and still maintain enough deniability so there is no chance for a declaration of war that would be acknowledged by NATO or the U.N.”

She paused to take a drink of water and to consider her next words.

“You call me on my use of the word apocalypse. Then tell me which word I should use when it is within the short reach of possibility for hackers to take down the power grids, disrupt the computers running the cellular networks with aggressive malware, and reveal our most confidential military secrets to our enemies? What should we call it when hackers can use viruses and tapeworms to destroy the medical records of hundreds of millions of Americans and then corrupt the data stored in the computers of hospitals, health-care companies, and trauma centers? What word would you give it when information on how to construct weapons of mass destruction are stolen and mass-released to the Taliban, ISIL, and others? Tell me, ladies and gentlemen,” said Schoeffel, “what word would you prefer that I use? I ask, because each and every one of those things is not only possible but likely.”

When no one spoke, she leaned closer to the mic.

“Or,” she said, “perhaps the more precise and accurate word is inevitable, and that’s why I went out to visit the DARPA camp. Everything I’ve seen, from the new generation of WarDogs to their WhiteHat Internet security program — they are our next best line of defense. I think we need to give them access to funding and to our integrated national-defense, banking, and infrastructure computer systems, because they are ready to fight what we know is coming.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

As I drove home to pack I called Mr. Church at the Hangar, the DMS headquarters at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. There are two lines I can use to reach him; one is for “when the world is about to end” crisis situations, and the other is for everything else. There were no missiles inbound and no one had released a global pandemic, so I used the main line. It was a coin flip of a choice, though. I’ve heard that he has a special ringtone for me, and I’ve tried lies, bribes, and threats to wheedle what it is from his staff. So far, no luck.

When Church answered, I told him about the weirdness in Baltimore.

“Sean called you?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“He knew why to call you?” There was the briefest of silences. It’s understood that no one gets admitted to the DMS circle of confidence without Church or Aunt Sallie’s blessing. It’s bad enough that too many members of the government know about us, but friends and family were not part of our calling plan, if you know what I mean.

“More or less,” I said, and explained that my dad told Sean a little, and that Sean had probably worked more of it out on his own. He really is a good detective. Church offered no rebuke; it was damage done, and lingering to bitch about it was counterproductive. He didn’t ask if my brother was sure about the nanobots.

When I was finished, he asked the same question Sam had asked: “Are you starting a file on this?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Kind of like to take a look at what he has and then make the call.”

“The nanotechnology may demand that it’s ours,” he said. “And there is the double connection of Prague and sex workers.”

“I know, which is why I’m going to take a look myself rather than hand it off to the Warehouse. Can you send a science tech down from the Hangar to process some samples?”

“Done. However, I have to caution you about waiting too long to decide if this is our case.”

“I hear you, believe me, but let’s face it, boss, we’re not flush with active field teams. I don’t want to make this into a big thing until I know that’s what it is. That could pull resources away from something else that’s more important.”

“Fair enough,” he said, though I could hear the doubt in his voice.

“I’d love to get Acharya on the damn phone. Any chance of that?”

“Without opening an official file? None. And, even if we did, I would have to speak directly with the president.”

“Why? We’ve always had an open-door policy with DARPA.”

“Kill Switch changed the politics of cooperation for the DMS, I’m afraid. I’m working on repairing that trust, but it’s much easier lost than rebuilt.”

“That sucks.”

“That’s life, Captain,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said sourly. “Look, before I fly the friendly skies I want to make sure you didn’t need me for anything else.”

The DMS field teams still left intact were all out in the field, because the world was going bug-fuck nuts. As usual. Or… maybe a little more than usual. Actually, maybe a lot more. Three high-ranking military scientists had died in “accidents” that seemed less accidental the closer we looked. Ecoterrorist protesters had blown up the Ice House, a biological-samples storage facility maintained covertly by NATO for everything from anthrax to Ebola, including twenty-two of the most virulent bioweapons developed during the Cold War. However, instead of shutting down the facility they had released hundreds of pathogens. Luckily, the Ice House was located on an ice pack at the top of the damn world, so the cold killed most of the bugs. A bunch of fuel-air bombs were used to make sure there was nothing left. Other DMS teams were looking into a possible deliberate release of a mutated and highly contagious strain of epidemic nephropathy, a type of viral hemorrhagic fever that isn’t supposed to be communicable human-to-human, but in this form it was. There was also shit tons of GPS hacking going on everywhere around the globe. A factory that made and assembled consumer-level quadcopter drones had been burned to the ground, but arson investigators were building a case for all the completed and packaged drones having been removed before the place was torched. And a firm that made virtual-reality goggles for the video-game market had been busted for including subliminal messages preaching violence against Muslim Americans.

A day in the life of the DMS. Or, I guess, to be more accurate, this was the world being the world. Crazy, dangerous, frequently lethal, often unkind, and populated with lots of very bad people. Am I a cynic? Not really, but I’m getting there, and I’m driving in the fast lane.

However, Church said, “Go to Baltimore.”

“Okay.”

“Take Dr. Sanchez with you.”

I hesitated. “Circe won’t be happy.”

Rudy Sanchez and I have been best friends for a lot of years, but last year he fell under a kind of mind control and attacked me while I was in the hospital. It wasn’t his fault, and the attack was directed by someone who was incredibly dangerous. It turned Rudy into a lethal weapon, and to stop him I had to inflict some serious injuries. I broke his leg so badly that he needed total knee replacement, and his nose had to be reconstructed. Unless you’re both Vikings, that is not the definition of a male-bonding experience. Rudy’s wife, Circe, kind of hated me now. Poor Rudy was caught between my need for him to forgive me, his need for me to forgive him, and Circe’s unfiltered loathing.

“Circe no longer works for the DMS,” said Church coldly.

That was the other thing. Very few people know that Circe O’Tree-Sanchez is the only known living relative of Mr. Church’s. The secret has been kept in order to protect her from Church’s many powerful enemies, who would love to have a weapon they could use against him. It’s possible that Circe, or her son — Church’s grandson — would be the key that unlocked the robot heart of the big man. However, since the Kill Switch thing last year, Circe had left the DMS and very clearly didn’t want anything to do with it. Or with us. She barely spoke to her father, blaming his lifestyle choices for putting her family in harm’s way. She had a point, but I knew that her decisions had to hurt the big man. He’d been less genial these past few months, colder and more distant. Not that he was ever Mr. Rogers to begin with. Even so, I felt bad for him.

“Okay,” I said, “but if Circe comes after me with a knife I’m using you as a human shield.”

He made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been a grunt of disgust. In either case, the line went dead. It always gives me the warm, fuzzy, bunny tinglies to share a moment with my boss.

I glanced over at Ghost, who was in the passenger seat looking out the window. Usually he was excited to go home, but Junie wasn’t there, so neither of us was enthused.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

First Sergeant Bradley Sims, known as Top to everyone, nursed a beer and watched as his partner, Master Sergeant Harvey “Bunny” Rabbit worked his way through a solid pound of peel-and-eat shrimp, a double side of grits, red rice, and six glasses of Diet Dr Pepper. Bunny ate without passion, more like a machine designed to feed itself. He would pluck a shrimp from the bowl, pull off its legs, use his thumbs to crack the shell open along the underside, pull off the shell, and put the meat into his mouth; he’d chew silently between ten and twelve times, then wash it down with a mouthful of fizz.

It was the diet soda that Top couldn’t understand. Rough count on everything on Bunny’s plate and in the sides, including the appetizer of hush puppies, was three thousand calories easy. Probably closer to four. Seemed to Top that a man approaching a meal with that kind of commitment ought to at least drink a regular soda — a coke, which is what they called every kind of soda down here. In the northern states from Washington to Michigan, they called it pop. In the Northeast and the West Coast, it was soda. Down here everything was a coke. Even a Diet Dr Pepper. Should have been a real Coke, though. That’s what Top figured.

His own meal — a grilled grouper sandwich on whole wheat with lettuce and red onion — was nearly untouched. The beer was a Landshark, a brand Top usually enjoyed but that he’d let go warm as he rolled the bottle back and forth between his calloused palms.

Since they came into the crab house, the only words either of them had spoken was to the waitress. Nothing at all to each other. That was becoming a thing with them. A new routine that replaced their old rhythm of being willing and able to talk about damn near anything. However, they’d logged a lot of silent miles on this gig. They’d flown from the Pier in San Diego to Oklahoma City and taken a car from the DMS field office there, and had since traveled thousands of miles. Zigzagging from place to place. Fayetteville to Pine Bluff, Memphis to Tuscaloosa, Montgomery to Alpharetta, and then half a dozen towns, large and small, in North Carolina, lower Virginia, and now South Carolina. After this, they would check into a motel for the night and in the morning head almost due south to Savannah, Charleston, and then down the long Atlantic side of Florida, hitting Fernandina Beach, Daytona Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami, after which the two of them would fly home to California. It was a rinse-and-repeat assignment. Go to a town, set up a meet with someone who was either a former or an active special operator, or a cop, or a Fed from the FBI, NSA, DEA, or ATF. They’d ask some questions, listen to the answers, tell the candidate very little, and promise to be in touch. Most of the times, that last part was a lie. So far, they hadn’t found anyone they felt sufficiently enthusiastic about to recommend as a candidate for the DMS.

It depressed Top, adding to the weight of everything else that had been pushing him down these past months. Ever since things went wrong last year, he had begun to lose faith in many of the structures he’d always believed were immutable. The DMS, their mission, his own optimism, and even what he believed about himself. Top had always trusted his own judgment and the stability of his personality. He had neither an inflated ego nor a falsely suppressed one. A lifetime in the military, both following orders and giving them, of time spent training and time spent on missions, of patches of peace and long runs through the valley of the shadow of death — all of that had allowed him to assess his skills, his strengths, his weaknesses. He knew who and what he was, and he was at peace with it. He knew that he could rely on his own judgment, moral view, and fairness as much as others could when he was part of a team. Mr. Church and Captain Ledger had each leaned on him in moments of crisis, and Top had become a cornerstone of the DMS field-operations structure. Top accepted that and worked to make sure that he was always a known quantity to the people who needed to trust him.

Now, though…?

When things started going bad for the DMS last year, he stayed steady, believing in the mission and in Echo Team. That changed when someone sneaked into his mind and smashed the controls, cut the wires, took over. The intruder used Top’s body like a hit-and-run car. He forced Top’s hands to use the tools of war to do dreadful things to the very people he had sworn his life to protect. He made Top complicit, however unwillingly, in the wholesale murder of innocent civilians.

Top understood the science of it. Long hours with Dr. Sanchez had helped him learn to say all the proper words about not accepting unearned guilt, about placing the blame where it truly belonged. Top understood that he had been used, and that he had no defense against it. He understood that the blame was not truly his.

Sure, he understood all of that.

But it didn’t change a goddamn thing. It had been his finger on the trigger. He had memorized the names of each victim, and every night he got down on his knees and prayed to whatever God was in heaven — if any god even existed anymore. He did not pray for his own soul but for those whose lives he had destroyed. The dead ones, and the living survivors who had to carry their own weight of grief and loss.

Bunny was going through it, too. They both had their minds raped; they had both committed unspeakable atrocities. It bonded them as much as it marked them.

What neither of them knew yet was whether it had ended them in every way that mattered to who they were and what they did. Since then they hadn’t fired a gun in anger. Sure, they could cap off a thousand rounds on the target range and never blink. That wasn’t the same thing. That wasn’t real. It was no more authentic combat than playing a first-person shooter game on Xbox. The question was whether either of them could be trusted to carry a weapon into combat. The question was whether their minds were ever going to be truly their own. The question was whether the violation had broken something crucial inside their hearts or minds or souls.

Top truly didn’t know.

Now they were out doing busywork because Captain Ledger and Dr. Sanchez hadn’t yet cleared them for fieldwork. They carried guns, but for the first time in Top’s adult life the SIG Sauer in his shoulder holster felt wrong, lumpy, awkward, and he felt like a dangerous jackass for carrying it.

He sighed and sipped his beer. It tasted like piss.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“In order to understand the significance of the coming technological singularity, you have to view things from a big-picture perspective,” John told his audience. “You need to step back from personal agendas and immediate needs and look at the world as a whole.”

The audience members were silent, attentive. Some leaned forward, and others were pressed back in their chairs as if they were afraid of what he was saying. Or repelled by his words. It was all the same to John. The message was what mattered.

“The fact that human beings developed self-awareness, problem-solving intelligence, the ability to invent and to have both abstract and practical thinking is every bit as important, and as inextricably tied to our evolutionary development, as the opposable thumb. Nature selected humans for survival. And everything around us, from the chairs on which you sit to the speakers that amplify my voice, to the automobiles in which you drove here, are by-products of that intelligence.”

He paused to let the audience digest that.

“Now we are on the leading edge of a new stage of evolution, and that is artificial intelligence. AI. We became smart enough and wise enough to be able to create machines whose functions not only approximate human thought but will ultimately surpass it. We have already built machines that can perform physical functions that exceed much of what humans can manage. There are already machines that are stronger, faster, more precise, less vulnerable, more versatile. We have machines that can fight fires, defuse bombs, oversee security, engage in combat, survive extreme environmental conditions, fly, swim, dive to astounding depths, and operate in microgravity. Machines do not require breathable air, and they can tolerate temperature ranges far beyond human endurance. Are there limits? Of course. Improved battery life is a constant challenge. The balance of durability, flexibility, and weight in materials is a challenge. Expense is a challenge. And processing speed can always be tweaked. But” — he paused again to smile — “those challenges are being met, and we’re constantly exceeding our own expectations when it comes to development and innovation.”

He pointed to a man in the fifth row who had gray hair.

“How old are you, sir?”

“Sixty-five,” said the man.

“I wouldn’t have guessed older than sixty,” said John, and waited through the ripple of laughter. “You were born before the computer age. Well before. Do you remember your first personal computer?”

“I do,” said the man. “It was a Commodore 64.”

More laughter, and even some sympathetic applause.

“Ah,” said John. “Do you recall how it felt to have your own computer?”

“Yes, I do. It was amazing. And when they came out with the Commodore 128 three years later, I was in heaven. I wrote my dissertation on that machine.”

“One hundred and twenty-eight K of memory,” said John. “The Commodore 128 was released in January 1985. How many of you here were alive then? Half? The rest of you were born after. Some, I see, born well after. That was the last of the eight-bit home computers. At the time, that was an amazing amount of memory. It provided astounding computational potential. For the first time, computers weren’t something used by corporations and the government. Now everyone could own one. Suddenly the power was in the hands of ordinary people. Wow! What a moment. And then in the nineties we saw the commercialization of the World Wide Web. The computer age became the Internet age. Now, what most people didn’t know was that these technologies were on a converging course with the early expert systems — what most people know as artificial intelligence. And robotics was flourishing quietly somewhere else. All of these technologies, which had long, painful histories of design and failure, structural limitations, and intimidating research costs, suddenly benefited from one another’s existence. These fields fed on the energetic potential in one another and soon began growing together.”

John paused once more.

“A perspective check,” he said. “The personal computer debuted less than forty years ago. The Internet ten years later. In terms of the scope of scientific invention, that’s a blip. It’s nothing. And yet consider how much has happened in each field since then. You can’t even find a piece of technology that uses sixty-four K of RAM. Nothing we have moves that slowly. Nothing. You can go to Staples and buy a five-terabyte external hard drive for less than a hundred and fifty dollars. By next year, the storage will be double that for half the cost. On the way home from Staples you can stop at Walmart and buy a drone, and you can take both home in your autonomous-drive car while talking to your cousin in London on your cell phone as music streams in real time from a concert being performed in Los Angeles.”

He watched people as they glanced at their phones and tweeted him on social media.

“Less than forty years,” he said. “I was born the year and the month that the Commodore 64 was released, and I will live to see computers, artificial intelligence, and robotics accelerate beyond all predicted models. Is the technological singularity coming?” He laughed. “It’s already begun.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Before I could call Rudy I got a text message and sent it to the dashboard screen. It said:

There was no ID, though. Odd. I accessed the voice command for Miss Moneypenny, which is the nickname someone hung on the DMS version of Siri. I think the actress whose voice was sampled for the system is Cate Blanchett. Very cool and veddy, veddy British.

“Identify text sender,” I said.

“Specify which text, Joe,” Miss Moneypenny said.

“Most recent.”

“Most recent text was from Delta Airlines, confirming your flight status.”

“No,” I said, “the one that just came in.”

“The most recent text was from Delta—”

Another text came in:

I growled at Miss Moneypenny. “I just received another text. Identify sender.”

“Joe, the most recent text was from Delta Airlines,” insisted the computer, and she gave me the time, which matched when the airline sent the flight info.

“Search all text messages for the last half hour,” I said.

“There have been no other texts received in the last half hour, Joe.”

“You’re an idiot,” I told her.

“Calling people names is childish.”

If I ever find out who programmed Miss Moneypenny, I’ll break my foot off in their ass. At the light I tried sending a reply text, but the incoming texts were gone. I sat there staring, my eyes flicking back and forth between my phone and the dashboard screen, and then jumped out of my skin when someone honked at me. I realized that I’d sat halfway through a green light, so I waved an apology and started driving.

I sent a text message to Junie, asking if she had just texted me. She sent a quick message that no, she hadn’t. She was in the field and couldn’t talk. She ended it with a quick “XOXO.”

A few seconds later I got another text, but as soon as I saw it I knew it wasn’t from Junie:

The message lingered for ten seconds and then deleted itself from my phone. Miss Moneypenny told me that it was never there. I tried to think which of my friends was having family issues but came up dry. I dictated a quick email to Bug, the DMS computer chief, and asked him to do one of those remote-systems-checks thingies. Five minutes later, I got a reply saying that my phone was working perfectly.

“That was weird,” I said to Ghost, but he was busy licking his balls.

So I said to hell with it and called Rudy to ask if he’d like to drop everything and catch a late flight back East. I briefly explained why.

“That is a very sad thing,” Rudy said. “Of course I’ll come with you.”

“Pack for a few days,” I suggested.

“Commercial air or Shirley?” he asked.

“Commercial,” I said, and we both sighed. Much as I love bouncing around in my own private jet — which, technically, belongs to the DMS, but I love saying that it’s my private jet — it’s expensive to fly. Hard to justify the costs unless the big clock was ticking down to boom time. That said, I knew that Lydia Rose could snag us a couple of first-class tickets. You take the comforts where you can get them. I told Rudy the flight time and we arranged to meet at the airport.

I sensed a disturbance in the Force and looked at Ghost, who was glaring at me from the passenger seat. Not sure if he actually understood that I was talking about airline reservations, but, if so, he knew what it meant. He’d be in a dog crate in the hold. If I was taking my own jet, he’d have an actual couch to himself. On a commercial flight, not so much. His brown eyes bored into mine.

“You’re going to shit in my shoes first chance you get, aren’t you?” I asked him.

He beamed at me and thumped his tail a couple of times.

“Damn,” I said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

They had a seat by a window with a view of the parking lot. Since neither of them had found much to say, Top dug into his briefcase and removed the folder on the person they were here to meet. He flipped open the cover and looked at the face of a black woman in a state-police uniform. Tracy Cole. Thirty years old, five feet seven inches tall, a native of Charleston. Served four years in the army, was attached to a U.N. detail doing security for a human-rights-assessment team. According to her records, she saw combat, and more than her fair share, but Cole was regular army, not Special Forces. She volunteered a lot, and this was often a red flag for Top. He distrusted almost everyone who went out of their way to get into a fight. Too often they were either trigger-happy bigots, broken ones with a death wish; revenge-seekers who’d lost someone in one of the wars; insecure types who were trying to prove something; or damn fools who thought this was all some kind of ultra-3-D video game.

He leafed through the notes of each action, written in the dry, acronym-heavy verbiage so prized by the military. It was on a par with the stilted language of police reports. Neither sounded as if the actions being described had anything to do with real human beings. Cole had two Purple Hearts. One was minor, from shrapnel; the other was from a knife. Top grunted as he searched for and found the incident report for the latter. And that’s when his interest was piqued, because although there was an official commendation for bravery stapled to the notice about the second Purple Heart, there was also a memo that had been sealed, written from the field officer to the company commander. MindReader had acquired it, of course. That note said that Cole had disobeyed a direct order not to interfere in an incident involving a small group of suspected ISIL soldiers in a compromised village. The entire region was fragile, and the officer in charge of the U.N. convoy had been afraid of things going south if his people got into anything with the locals. However, there was a small boardinghouse in the village that was on a list of suspected “hospitality” centers.

In the language of ISIL a hospitality center was what they called a rape hotel. A comfort station. Tracy Cole had tried to get her lieutenant to take some action, to at least investigate, but the officer was either timid or had a stronger read on the local situation. He ordered Cole to return to her platoon and stand down. She returned to the small house where her platoon was bunked down, but only long enough to wait for dark, gear up, and go hunting. As it turned out, not only was the hotel being used to hold seven girls and women, ranging in age from eleven to twenty-three, but there were also weapons and explosives stored in the basement. And there was a worktable behind a locked cellar door where canvas vests were being rigged with stolen C4.

According to the memo, Cole had attempted to leave quietly and report this to her commander, but a guard spotted her and there was a fight. She took some serious knife wounds to the face, shoulder, and stomach, but she killed her attacker. The scuffle woke everyone up, and then there was a big damn gunfight. The startled ISIL team began firing randomly at everyone. That’s when the U.N. team, roused, came running. When it was over there were eight dead ISIL shooters, two women were hospitalized for damage from ricochets, and Cole was nearly dead on her feet.

The lieutenant called in for support, and the village was surrounded and thoroughly searched. Eight more ISIL fighters were found, and these were taken alive. A total of twenty-six hostages were freed: the sex slaves and several people from the village who had been under guard in order to keep the villagers in line. When the story hit the news services, the action was listed as an “official rescue operation undertaken by United Nations Peacekeepers.” Cole wasn’t named, nor, Top noted, was her lieutenant. After that action, Cole was transferred Stateside and did the equivalent of busywork until the rest of her term of service burned off. She didn’t re-enlist. Top guessed that she was advised not to. Or maybe she’d become disillusioned by the constant play of bad nerves and questionable politics.

As he closed her file, Top caught movement in the parking lot and saw that a white 4Runner had pulled in and a woman got out on the passenger side and slammed the door very forcefully. She wore bluejeans, cowboy boots, a plain white T-shirt, and a ball cap that threw shadows over her face in the downspill of tangerine light from the sodium-vapor streetlamps. She walked three paces away from the truck, whirled, and stabbed the air as she said something to whoever was behind the wheel. Top couldn’t hear her words, but he would have bet his pension she wasn’t saying “I love you.” There was a lot of anger and indignation in every line of her body.

Top tapped the tabletop with a fingernail, and Bunny came out of his thoughts, looked at the finger, then followed Top’s gaze.

“That her?” asked the big young man.

“Looks like it.”

They watched her stand there and continue to emphasize whatever she was saying by jabbing the air with her finger.

“Uh-oh. She’s pissed at someone,” said Bunny. “Husband?”

“Not married.”

“Boyfriend?”

“Or someone,” said Top. “Hold on, here we go.”

The driver’s door opened and a man got out. He was a big light-skinned black man. Not as tall as Bunny’s six-six but close, and he had all the sculpted muscles of a dedicated bodybuilder: broad shoulders, a deep chest, flat abs, and a tiny waist. He wore a muscle shirt that showed off his big arms, and jeans that put his crotch on display. Like Cole’s, the muscle freak’s body was rigid with anger, and he stalked around the front of the pickup and stood towering over the woman.

“Lovers’ quarrel?” mused Bunny.

“That’d be my guess,” Top agreed.

The argument outside was intensifying, with both of them gesticulating. There was a difference, though, and Top noted it. The man was waving his arms all over the place, as if he had so much rage inside that he wanted to throw it around, paint the walls of the restaurant and all the cars in the lot with it. His hands moved with great speed and force, and Top was pretty sure the guy was having a very hard time not directing that power in the same direction as his words. The woman, on the other hand, was clearly furious, but the more hysterical and demonstrative the man got, the less dramatic her own movements became. As if she was pulling her power in, containing it. Either she was being gradually cowed by the bruiser or in the face of his rage and physical potential she was priming herself for action. Top rather thought it was the latter. The drama was maybe going to end with both of them storming off in separate directions — and probably separate lives — or it was going to turn nasty. There was a palpable violence in the air.

“He hits her and I’m going out there to hand him his own dick,” said Bunny.

Without looking, Top nudged Bunny’s plate of shrimp closer to the big man. “Eat your sea roaches and enjoy the show, Farm Boy.”

The woman said one last thing that landed on the man like a physical blow. It staggered him, and he actually took a half step backward. The woman opened the door, reached in, came out with a cell phone, and held it up so that he could see the screen. The man gaped at it, his mouth slack, then, with a speed that surprised the woman, slapped the phone out of her hand. It flew ten feet and smashed to bits against the side of a heavy wooden trash can. Then the man tried to use the same speed to grab the woman’s wrist.

Bunny lurched to his feet, but Top didn’t. He sat there, fascinated, watching as the woman evaded the grab with a boxer’s backward lean, and then bent forward and used the flats of both palms to shove the man backward. She did it fast, and she did it at exactly the right angle to send the bruiser crashing heavily and awkwardly into the fender of the 4Runner. He dropped to one knee and stared for a moment at the huge dent his shoulder had made in the white metal. Everyone at the restaurant was staring at the drama. Bunny was heading toward the door. Top, smiling, sat where he was.

The muscle freak came up off the ground and tried to belt Cole with a blow that would have dimmed her lights and put her in a neck brace. She leaned back, agile as a boxer, let it pass, and then stepped into the man, her hands moving so fast that Top couldn’t tell whether she hit him five times or six. They weren’t what he would have labeled combat blows. She wasn’t going for a kill or even trying to do serious damage. No, this woman was schooling the asshole. She hit him in the throat, the nose, the lip, the eye, and the nuts. Maybe one or two other places. She didn’t hit him very hard, but damn if she didn’t know what she was about. The lip split, the nose erupted into blood, the eye puffed shut, and the guy dropped to his knees, cupping his balls, while his face turned a ghastly shade of brick red. Then the woman took a fistful of his short hair, jerked his head back, and bent close to spit in his face. She thrust him sideways and he crashed once more against his truck, though this time his shoulder hit the tire and did no damage. He fell over, trembling and weeping, looking very small for such a big man.

By this time Bunny was in the parking lot, closing on her with long strides, his face set in lines of indignation.

Top sat back in his chair and took a deep swallow of his warm beer.

Top didn’t take particular notice of the small man seated alone at a deuce thirty feet from him. The man wore a nylon windbreaker and a billed cap. Both the jacket and the cap bore the logo of Apex HVAC, a company that handled the installation, upgrade, and maintenance of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems for thousands of small businesses in that part of South Carolina. Apex was part of a much larger conglomerate that provided the same services — as well as sprinkler and Halon systems — for larger industrial firms. The man had spent much of the past two years installing special upgrades, and had even serviced this restaurant a few days ago to bring it up to code.

The name stenciled above the logo on the left breast of the jacket was Mitch. Today would be Mitch’s last visit to the crab house. He had a half-eaten Salisbury steak in front of him and a freshly topped-off cup of coffee. There was nothing particularly remarkable about Mitch’s appearance, and when Top had earlier scanned the room he saw a thirtysomething man who was so ordinary that he blended seamlessly into the crowd. Which was rather the point.

Mitch made three calls during the thirty-five minutes he was there. The first was to report that he was on station and had secured a table with excellent visual access to the inside of the crab house. The second call was to confirm the identities of the two big men at a nearby table. He didn’t make the third call until after Tracy Cole arrived. When he checked with the images stored on his phone, he hit the speed dial for his contact. The call was answered at once by a man with a French accent.

“We’re all good,” said Mitch, then he added, “We’re live in five.”

“Très bien,” murmured the Concierge. “You had better get out of there.”

“Yup,” said Mitch. He ended the call and signaled the waitress for the check. While he waited for the check he took a small Altoids tin out of his pocket, opened it, removed two unmarked capsules, and swallowed them with the last of his coffee. His hands were shaking as he put the tin back into his pocket. He paid the bill and left.

Mitch made sure that he moved casually, naturally, and not at all as if he was running for his life.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I fed my overweight, middle-aged, and frequently cranky marmalade tabby, Cobbler, and then took him down to the nice old lady who lives in the condo below me. She was always game to babysit the old boy and, on occasion, Ghost, too. The neighbors tell me she sings to them. Old bluesy standards from the forties and fifties. Cobbler perked up when he saw her and pretty much instantly forgot that I existed. Cats, y’know?

Ghost and I got to the airport first. While we waited for Rudy, I got another text on my phone. This time the message said:

Again there was no identification, and again Miss Moneypenny told me there was no text, even though I was staring right at it. Then it occurred to me that it could be Sean using a burner and trying some kind of code on me. That didn’t fit right, though, because burners didn’t have text functions. So I texted back:

The reply was equally as confounding as the other messages:

I responded, asking what she meant. There was no answer. Had it, in fact, been Sean? We don’t have a sister, so none of the texts would make sense, and if it was a code, then he was being way too cryptic. I double-checked with Bug, and he told me that my phone was fine. He sounded busy and annoyed, and told me to simply disable the text function.

I did.

Then my phone rang and it was Steve Duffy, one of the agents at the Warehouse in Baltimore, the local DMS shop.

“Yo, Cowboy,” he said. “Got the goodies from your bro and am on the way back to the barn. Got a couple of science geeks coming down from the Hangar to pick it up. There’s some paperwork and digital stuff that I’ll upload to your laptop.”

“Any problems with the pickup?”

“Nah. Your brother doesn’t smile much. He always a sourpuss?”

“It’s been a long couple of days. He’s okay,” I said. “You spot any tail around my brother? Black SUVs or anyone else?”

“No, and we looked pretty hard. Even so, we have some birds in the air. If we get anything, I’ll be in touch.”

The “birds” he mentioned were the latest generation of pigeon surveillance drones. They looked real and had adaptive behavioral software that allowed them to learn from real pigeons. Unless you absolutely knew they were fake you’d be tempted to toss them breadcrumbs. It was a weird and somewhat troubling irony that the DMS was using pigeon drones for urban aerial surveillance. It was pigeon drones armed with explosives that had destroyed our field office here in Baltimore, killing nearly two hundred people. All friends of mine. Brothers in arms. And that same blast was how Rudy lost an eye. Add to that the attack at Citizens Bank Park, which was mostly carried out by bomb-carrying pigeon drones. You’d think after all that we wouldn’t go anywhere near that technology. But… it’s a useful bit of science. No, we don’t put bombs on our drones, but we do use them. Lately we’ve used a lot of them, and the technology was something we stole from the bad guys. As I said, a troubling irony.

“Hey, Duffy,” I said before he hung up. “You didn’t by any chance just text me, did you?”

“Text you? No,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, and ended the call. Ghost suddenly jumped to his feet and gave a single, happy whuff, and I saw Rudy getting out of a cab with three large suitcases.

“Jeez, Rude. I said to pack for only a few days.”

“I did,” he replied, then nodded toward the single suitcase I’d brought. “And while I’m sure you have a nicely polished lecture all prepared about living the spartan life and the science of packing for field operations, consider three things.” He counted them off on his fingers. “First, you neglected to say what we’d be doing for those few days, so I wisely planned for multiple business and social contingencies. Second, we have significant differences in our approach to personal grooming, as I believe we’ve previously discussed.”

“And third —?”

He smiled. “You may kiss my ass.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

“Said with all due respect.”

“Of course.”

He dug into his pocket for a dog treat and gave it to Ghost, who took it with great delicacy while giving me a vile and challenging look. Because Ghost was a combat dog he was trained not to accept treats from anyone but me. This is a rule Ghost breaks with a mixture of guile, outright defiance, and a sense of humor. He knows it bugs the shit out of me. Rudy is a frequent accomplice in this unsanctioned activity. As he munched the treat, Ghost gave me a look that said, “Hey, rules are human constructs, and as a lowly four-legged animal I’m clearly not capable of understanding the subtleties.” The smile on his doggy face didn’t sell his innocence. Not for a moment.

Rudy, pretending not to notice, stood by while I checked Ghost with the animal handlers. As they took him away, Ghost whined and shifted his expression so that he looked put-upon and oppressed. I know he’s messing with me, but it always works. I always felt guilty when we flew like this. I caught Rudy watching me.

“What the hell are you smiling at?” I growled.

“It’s not unreasonable to suggest that you like animals more than you like people.”

“Most people,” I corrected.

“Most people,” he agreed. He cut me a look. “How is Junie?”

“Away.”

He studied me, nodded, and didn’t pursue it.

“Say, Rude, did you just text me?”

“Me? Text? Surely you jest.” Rudy absolutely hates texting, believing it to be a sure and certain step toward an inevitable disconnect between people. He’s not all that much of a fan of phones, for that matter. He likes actual human contact. Weird.

Aboard the plane, Rudy took the aisle seat and I had the window. We watched the passengers file past us, many of them giving us looks of longing or contempt, because first class is comfy and no other seat on the airplane ever is. I know; I’ve squeezed my long legs into coach many, many times. The flight attendant brought us drinks, with which I tried to drown my guilt as old folks, women with children, and ordinary people crowded down the narrow aisle.

“You know that most flights don’t even offer free nuts and pretzels anymore,” I murmured to Rudy. “As if the marginal cost of twenty-four peanuts or eighteen pretzels will crash the stock for the airline. And yet up here in first class we pretty much get blow jobs and foot massages.”

He sipped his wine and, unlike me, met the eyes of the people filing into the plane. “Status is an entirely subjective thing. We both know that there are people in poverty who are both noble and of great value to humanity, and superrich whose intrinsic worth to society is too small to be measured, as well as every iteration in between. So having money, even having earned money, conveys a status that is entirely subjective. But because it has become a habit within civilized cultures, we share in the perpetuation of the shame. This moment is a wonderful case study of that. If our roles were reversed — and it has been for both of us — we would harbor the same resentment toward the people in these seats as the folks passing us do. And we’d be equally justified and equally wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“Of course,” Rudy said. “There are so many assumptions attached to this. The configuration of the airplane necessitates that people are paraded past seats they know are more luxurious than the ones to which they are headed. The assumption is that we’re special and they’re not, which is untrue. It’s part of an enforced perception of social classes based on disposable income. Nothing about this speaks to the quality of our character.”

“No argument,” I said, and sipped my Jack-and-ginger.

A man in a rumpled business suit gave me a look of unfiltered contempt. The woman behind him was juggling a baby and two pieces of carry-on luggage. She glanced at us and quickly looked away.

Rudy leaned close to me. “You see that woman? She was actually so embarrassed that she couldn’t maintain eye contact.”

“Yeah, but why?”

“It’s not a logical thing, Joe. As I said, this is purely subjective. She has a child and clearly could not afford, or was unwilling to pay for, these seats, and she believes that to make eye contact is to share a conversation in which that financial disparity is a key topic. So instead she hurried past us. I would bet that she feels somewhat defeated as a person and as a mother, because this is an example of the things she can’t afford for her child.”

“That’s not fair, though,” I protested. “The only reason I can afford these seats is that I don’t spend a lot of the money I make, and Junie has her inheritance and—”

“You don’t have to justify it, Joe. Not to me and not to her. This isn’t a matter reinforced by logic. And don’t pretend that I don’t know you chose first class primarily for my comfort, because of my bad leg.”

I felt my face get hot. I mumbled something so low and indistinct that even I didn’t know what it was. Rudy patted my arm.

“Most people can’t justify the extra money for this kind of comfort. For most of our lives we couldn’t, either, and even now I tend to choose Economy Plus over first class because I’m appalled at the markup. The drinks, snacks, and food they give us, even coupled with the wider seats and extra legroom, doesn’t truly excuse doubling the fare. However, the airline knows that the status associated with first class is why people pay that money. There’s some snobbery in it for some of our fellow passengers in this class, and there’s affectation in it for everyone. Tell me you don’t feel more important when they announce that first-class passengers may board using the special-access lane, even though it means walking on a different-color carpet and passing on a different side of a metal pole?”

I said nothing. The Jack Daniel’s in my glass now tasted like toilet water. I drank it down and ordered another and glowered out the window. At one point, I heard Rudy chuckling softly to himself.

“You’re not a very nice man,” I told him.

That made him laugh out loud.

INTERLUDE FOUR

“The problem is ongoing,” said the school official, “and it’s escalating.”

“Then how can we help?” asked the doctor.

They sat together in the shade of an old fig tree in the small garden in front of the school. Children came and went, some nodding respectfully to the official, others lost in their own thoughts.

“This school is a rarity here in Cairo,” said the official, Aziz Negm, an energetic man of forty who oversaw the funding for the school as well as that of several community outreach programs. “We have donors and grants, and that allows us to provide a higher level of education for our students than, sadly, is common here. This is the fifteenth most populous city in the world, and it is an old city. When it was built, there was no way to foresee a population growth as intense as what we’ve experienced since the middle of the twentieth century. There is not enough agriculture and industry to adequately provide for all of these people. The poorest families spend half of their household income on food, and the food they can afford to buy is often less nutritious.”

“We have the same problem in the States,” said the doctor. “Poor people eating fast food and starving while becoming obese.”

“It’s obscene,” said Negm.

“Yes,” agreed the doctor. Howard Levithan, formerly of Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and now with the World Health Organization, was a kind-faced man of sixty. Young-looking for his age, with laugh lines around his eyes and mouth, though he wasn’t laughing now.

“Malnutrition in Egypt is up,” said Negm, “with thirty-one percent of children under five years of age developmentally stunted as a result. Chronic malnutrition is irreversible and stops children from reaching their full physical and mental potential. It’s not just here, my friend, it’s everywhere. We are being forced to watch as a generation of children starve to death before our eyes. And it will only get worse.”

“Perhaps not irreversible, Mr. Negm,” said Levithan. “There are new food supplements being developed that can reverse some of the effects of even prolonged malnutrition.”

“Even cognitive deterioration?”

“It’s likely, though that is still being studied. The short-term effects of these supplements are improved overall health with a bias toward bone growth and a stronger immune system. We are aware that malnutrition brings with it acute vulnerability to certain diseases. The WHO and our partners are looking to push back against that trend.”

Negm leaned back. “That is quite a claim, Doctor. Is this also being tested on children in America?”

“Yes. Look, Mr. Negm,” said Levithan as he leaned in, “this isn’t a matter of the poor are offered a cure for a minor disease in exchange for agreeing to participation in clinical trials of a new drug. The WHO is not in the pocket of Big Pharma. We never have been, which is why we are often scrambling for funding. The food supplements I’m talking about are underwritten by grants from hundreds of different foundations, private donors, and legacy endowments. And, yes, they are being given to poor communities all over the globe, not just in Third World areas. The National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration have thoroughly vetted all of this, and we have independent laboratory analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and nine other organizations.” He paused. “It’s not a miracle solution. It doesn’t end hunger. This isn’t a magic trick. No, sir, what this does is provide essential nutrition at such a reduced cost that it can be manufactured and sold in mass quantities to areas like Cairo, Shanghai, Bangladesh, and elsewhere. And in the poorer sections of the United States as well.”

Negm frowned and looked down at the box that rested on the bench between them. Twenty food bars sealed in individual white wrappers. Each wrapper included ingredients and nutritional data. He picked one up and reread the information. The afternoon was hot, and there was a constant buzz and hiss from the trucks spraying for mosquitoes. As one truck rolled slowly past the school, the men turned to watch it.

“They’re spraying all the time now,” said Negm. “First for the mosquitoes carrying West Nile, now for Zika. What’s next?”

The doctor shook his head. “Mother Nature does not like to be thwarted.”

“Excuse me?”

“When we stop the spread of a disease by eliminating the vector — in this case, a certain subspecies of mosquito — it leaves a gap in the biosphere. Mother Nature abhors that vacuum and mutates something to fill it. You can track all of history by looking at how often small mutations have carved out large pieces of the human herd.”

The administrator winced. “I beg your pardon, Doctor, but that is a rather disturbing thing to say.”

Dr. Levithan nodded. “And, sadly, it’s true.”

Forty minutes later Dr. Levithan unlocked the door of his hotel room, entered, locked the door, and spent a few careful minutes using a small electronic device to make sure that no surveillance equipment had been installed while he was out. It was a ritual with him, no matter where he was in the world. Since beginning his work with nutritional supplements, he had visited seventeen of the world’s most populous cities. After a while, every hotel room looked the same. After a while, the masses of poor, starving, undereducated, dirty, and needy people of all ages began to blur. They gradually lost any trace of ethnic or cultural identity. They lost their attachment to age and gender. For Levithan they were simply “them,” and if they had any shared characteristic that he did take note of it was the constant outstretched hand. Give me, give me, give me. Said in a hundred languages, always meaning the same thing.

He took a hot shower and washed with the special soaps he had brought with him. Then he sat on the edge of the bed, opened a small zippered case, removed a small vial of amber-colored liquid, and used a disposable syringe to draw off one-third of the contents. He tapped the needle to remove air bubbles and then injected the drug into his thigh.

As he always did. Especially after the spray trucks had been through.

Because, God knows, he didn’t want to catch what those trucks were spraying. There were twelve full cases of the nutrition bars stacked against the wall of his bedroom. He would be visiting five schools tomorrow, four the day after that, and the last three on his final day in Cairo. So far he had obtained signed agreements from eighty-three schools in seven countries. His goal by the end of the year was to have an additional two hundred agreements signed. There were sixteen shipping containers sitting in the port, crammed to the ceiling with the bars. Another forty containers of the chemical spray had already been off-loaded and hoisted onto the backs of trucks for delivery throughout this part of the Middle East. The paperwork had been expedited by officials who wanted to expedite the delivery of those precious anti-mosquito chemicals. It amused Levithan to think that most of the officials, even some of those who took bribes as a matter of course, thought they were doing something good for their people.

Idiots.

Levithan sometimes found it hard not to laugh in their faces.

As for the others, those select few officials here and there who were on the inside track — to one degree or another — they were more practical. Not that Levithan liked them any more than he liked the rest of the unwashed herd. They were going to die, too. He did have a grudging respect for them. At least those few were realistic about the way things work. Even if they didn’t know that their worldview was only a partial one, clouded by their own genetic and cultural deficiencies. Mud people. Sand niggers. Levithan had a lot of different names for them that he used when talking with other members of the Havoc inner circle. Not terms he would ever use to the people here. No. Levithan disliked and even detested these people, but he fully appreciated their capacity for violence.

The other nineteen doctors in his group were doing the same kind of work he was. There was a delicious bonus for whoever moved the most tonnage, and Levithan believed that he would earn that bonus for the second year in a row.

He threw the syringe into the trash, ordered room service, and, while he waited, placed a scrambled call to Zephyr Bain.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Bunny walked toward the woman, hands up and palms out in a “no problem” gesture. She stood her ground, eyes narrowed and suspicious, hands low at her sides, but her weight shifted slightly onto the balls of her feet. Ready to run, ready to fight.

“Officer Tracy Cole?” asked Bunny, stopping ten feet out.

Cole’s eyes were instantly filled with suspicion and hostility. “Who’s asking?”

Bunny smiled and nodded to the weeping muscle freak. “Right now, call me a fan.”

“That’s not funny,” said Cole.

“It’s a little funny,” said Bunny.

She measured out a meager slice of a smile. It was there and gone, leaving her mouth downturned and hard. “Who are you?”

“One of the guys you’re here to meet. My partner’s inside,” said Bunny. “But before we go in let’s clear the decks, okay?”

Without waiting for her reply, Bunny walked past her, hooked a hand under the injured man’s arm, and jerked him to his feet. The man was big and dense, but Bunny was bigger and stronger. And he was showing off a little. The muscle freak came up off the ground with such force that he actually hopped through the air and landed flat on his feet. Bunny pressed him back against the truck. The man tried to sniff back his tears and his hurt, but his face was flushed red and puffed. Despite his size, he looked like a petulant and mean child. He tried to slap Bunny’s hand away, but he lacked the power for that or for anything. The moment owned him, and the muscle freak knew it.

“Hey, now,” said Bunny quietly. “I’m not sure who you are, chief, and I don’t give much of a shit why you made this nice lady hand you your ass, but it’s time to boogie on down the road. Believe me when I tell you that there is nothing you can say that will make this end any other way except worse. So, unless you want to shit in a bag the rest of your life, you’re going to get into your truck and haul ass out of here. You don’t bother the lady again, and I don’t see you again.”

The whole time he spoke Bunny never raised his voice, and he kept his palm flat against the man’s chest, fingers splayed. He was not as advanced a martial artist as Top or Captain Ledger, but he knew enough judo to angle his mass and weight in order to use all his muscular bulk and size to give the impression that he was both an irresistible force and an unmovable object.

“Nod if we’re all on the same page here,” suggested Bunny.

The man flicked a glance past him at the woman, then back to Bunny, and then let his gaze fall. He nodded.

Bunny stepped back. Without the pressure of Bunny’s hand, the bodybuilder almost dropped to his knees, but he caught himself, straightened with a fractured attempt at dignity, turned, and stumped slowly around to the driver’s side. He pawed at the blood on his face and tentatively probed his nose. Then he climbed inside, started the engine, and drove away, rolling slowly past the line of big semis parked at the far end of the lot. When he reached the road, he gunned the engine and laid down a twenty-foot patch of smoking rubber.

Bunny snorted and turned to the woman. “Boyfriend?”

“Past tense.” she said.

Bunny grinned.

“And you can wipe that shit-eating grin off your face, asshole,” she said. “I didn’t need or want your help.”

“If I thought you needed my help, sister, I’d have gotten out here a little faster. All I did was pick up the trash. Call it a public service. Besides, we’re on the clock. I just wanted to wrap this episode of Dancing with the Assholes so we can get down to business. Fair enough?”

She thought about it, standing with fists on hips, head angled as she squinted through sunlight to look up at him. The tension of the fight was still rippling through her, and he could see embarrassment and hurt in her dark eyes. Whatever had sparked the ugly encounter was doing her harm. Her control was impressive, though.

“You’re First Sergeant Sims?” she asked.

“Nah, I’m the good-looking one,” said Bunny. “Master Sergeant Harvey Rabbit.”

“I saw that on the letter my captain gave me. Your name is really Harvey Rabbit?”

“Yup. My dad was kind of an asshole.”

“Sounds like it.”

“Call me Bunny,” he said, and offered his hand. She took his hand, gave it a single, firm pump. Bunny pointed to the crab house. “Sims is in there. Call him Top. He thinks he’s in charge, but it’s all me.”

“Why don’t I believe you?”

He grinned, and they began walking toward the restaurant.

That’s when they saw the blood.

And heard the screams.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“I don’t suppose you know anything about this nanotech stuff?” I said to Rudy.

He brooded into the depths of his wineglass for a moment. “It’s not really my field, of course, but I’ve read quite a bit about the medical uses, and I had some conversations with Bill Hu a while back. He was quite fascinated with its potential in espionage and field support. He was less enthused about being able to regulate it once the technology was perfected and made readily available.”

“Like drones,” I said sourly.

“Like drones. Hu expressed valid concerns about drones even before the Predator One case, and look how that turned out. Part of Hu’s genius was to be able to look at a new or emerging aspect of science and follow certain lines of thought to imagine what dreadful uses it could be put to. In that, he was well suited to the DMS. Call it a kind of strategic paranoia. Predictive rather than merely alarmist.”

“Good thing he was on our side.”

“Very good thing,” Rudy said. “Hu had concerns about nanotech and, to pardon a bad pun, infected me with his unease.”

“Really? You don’t seem particularly paranoid, Rude.”

“I hide it well. My glass eye confuses any attempt to read my expression.” Rudy had lost an eye in a helicopter crash in Baltimore, and one of Church’s friends had replaced the damaged one with a superb fake. It didn’t give Rudy telescoping vision or any cool Million Dollar Man stuff, but it moved like the real one and was synced so that the fake pupil dilated in harmony. He looked at me with those eyes, both as dark as polished coal. “The science of nanotechnology was introduced by the late Nobel physicist Richard Feynman back in 1959. He was giving a dinner talk and said something to the effect that there was ‘plenty of room at the bottom,’ meaning that industrial and mechanical expansion was moving solidly outward but that there was potential for miniaturization. He proposed using delicate machinery to make even more delicate — and smaller — machines, and those would, in turn, make smaller ones, and so on. It was his belief that machines could be miniaturized down to the atomic level. He saw no practical reason why it couldn’t be done and felt that such a technological path was inevitable. He postulated manipulation of matter at the atomic, molecular, and supramolecular levels.”

I nodded. “Didn’t he make some joke about swallowing a doctor?”

“He did, though Feynman credited that concept to his friend and graduate student Albert Hibbs, it was a reference to the possibility of one day constructing a surgical robot so small that it could be swallowed. The construction of such a thing could not be done by human hands, so it involved having machines build smaller and smaller versions of themselves, all the way down to the molecular level. And, Joe, this idea was actually anticipated by the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein in his story ‘Waldo,’ which was released in the early forties. Oddly, though, Feynman’s ideas weren’t acted on for quite a long time. Not until the mid-1980s, actually, when MIT engineering graduate K. Eric Drexler published his book Engines of Creation. That really ignited a more intense worldwide interest in nanotechnology. Since then, nanotech and nanites have become words in common usage.”

I grunted. “So this isn’t really something new?”

“In concept? No. In practical application, yes. Knowing that we wanted to build microminiaturized surgical or medical machines is one thing, but having the technology to do it is another. It took three-quarters of a century to bring us to where we are now and, from what Bill Hu told me, we have a long way to go.”

“Apparently not, or we wouldn’t be on this plane.”

Rudy sighed. “That’s what alarms me. About this and so many other things we encounter. We believe that we grasp where science is on a topic and then we’re faced with either an unforeseen practical application or a leap forward in development. Sadly, that’s something we’ll be seeing more and more often, Joe. It’s not only that the products of science are getting smaller but the equipment to develop and manufacture these things has become less cumbersome and more affordable. Laptop computers, portable laboratory setups, even mass production relies on compact, transportable, and affordable hardware.” He lowered his voice. “The DMS has faced as many small mobile terrorist cells as they have large-scale. With nanotechnology there is no conceptual zero point for miniaturization. Especially with machines that are designed to make smaller machines. That’s a cycle that will continue down to the subatomic level. When you include mass replication as a function, well…”

“You’re scaring me to death,” I told him.

The plane hit an air pocket and dropped so suddenly that everyone yelped. Rudy’s face went from a medium tan to the color of old paste. “Now we’re both scared.” I don’t like skydiving, but Rudy hates to fly at all. The cabin steward must have seen his face, and she materialized with a fresh glass of wine. When in doubt, anesthetize the customers.

Rudy drank about half of it, sighed, drank some more, then nodded and continued where he had left off. “We like to talk about being on the cutting edge of science, Cowboy, but in truth we don’t know where the cutting edge actually is, because it changes every day. We can be at the forefront one minute and then that boundary can be pushed far beyond our current reach in an instant, and that’s as true for viral and bacterial mutations as it is for computer software, robotics, and nanotech.”

I glared down into my whiskey. “You are harshing my buzz.”

“You should watch one of the YouTube lectures by John the Revelator. He’ll sober you up in a heartbeat.”

“Who in the wide blue fuck is John the Revelator? Some kind of evangelist?”

“Of a kind. He talks about the coming technological singularity. You know what that is?”

“Sure. Skynet becomes self-aware and launches the nukes. I’ve seen Terminator, like, eighty times.”

“It’s John’s opinion that movies of that kind are like the nuclear-apocalypse novels of the fifties and sixties, that they’re predictive and cautionary tales. The difference is that John thinks we should embrace this event.”

“Why? Is he an android?”

“No. He’s flesh and blood. I’ve met him. He did a book signing at Mysterious Galaxy books in San Diego. Very well-spoken man, and although we’ve never met before, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we had. He has that kind of charisma. He says that, because this event is inevitable, at some point in the not-too-distant future it’s in our best interests to accept it and attempt to curate it.”

“‘Curate’? How? By polishing the boots of the robot overlords?”

“No. Though he has made a joke to that effect on a few occasions.” The plane continued to bump, and Rudy finished his glass. By the time we switched planes in Atlanta, I was going to have to carry him. “John says that we have to develop artificial intelligence, and to allow it to grow at its own pace, which he says will be exponential and dramatic. But, at the same time, we have to control the safeguards that will always allow a select few to control the overall system without interfering with the rate of AI growth.”

“Don’t we already do that?”

“Sadly, no. Hu told me that there are quite a few research groups that haven’t imposed any controls on AI development for fear of limiting or interfering with the development of true computer intelligence.”

I raised my empty glass. “All in favor of not doing that, say ‘Aye.’”

“John would agree. He says that we should always be in control.”

“Not sure how much I like that ‘chosen few’ part of it, though, Rude.”

“Nor I,” admitted Rudy. “Unfortunately, the signing was too crowded to allow me to pursue the topic with him and find out what he meant. I wonder if Dr. Acharya would know. He was the one who first told me about John the Revelator. Did I understand correctly that he’s not available?”

“He’s in Washington State at the DARPA thing,” I said.

“What DARPA thing?”

“They’re testing new versions of BigDog.”

Rudy looked blank, so I explained that there was a robotics testing facility in the middle of no-damn-where in the big timber country of the Pacific Northwest. DARPA had been working on building the next generation of tactical-use robots. BigDog was a dynamically stable quadruped robot developed in 2005 by the guys at Boston Dynamics, along with the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, and some guys from the Harvard University Concord Field Station. I said, “BigDog doesn’t actually look like a dog. No fake hair or lolling tongue or any of that. Doesn’t beg for treats or pee on the rug. It has four legs and a bulky utilitarian body. Kind of like a big robot mastiff without a head.”

“Charming,” said Rudy sourly. “I seem to remember seeing something about that on YouTube a few years ago. Someone kicked it.”

“Yeah. That was an early prototype. They showed it walking, climbing steps, running. They also showed some guy kicking it to knock it over so they could demonstrate how it regained balance. People freaked, though.”

“Well, they would,” he said, nodding. “We rush to anthropomorphize everything. When the robot dog stumbled, it connected the viewers with our memories of dogs we’ve known being injured. If it was actually destroyed, say by being hit by a car, people would be appalled. They’d grieve as if it was real.” He cut me a look. “How did you react?”

I shrugged. “It’s only a machine and—”

“Joe…”

“Okay, it pissed me off, too.”

“Even though you know it has no consciousness and no feelings?”

“Sure. I never claimed to be less crazy than other people.”

“It’s not an issue of sanity, Cowboy,” he said. “It’s a quality of our nature as compassionate beings who are genetically and culturally hardwired to nurture and protect.”

“Still only a machine,” I said.

“Do you think the people who posted the video were unaware of how the public would react?”

“Jury’s out on that. Scientists can be detached in weird ways. And sometimes they can be malicious little pricks.”

Rudy gave me a fond and tolerant smile, which I chose to ignore.

I said, “The Marines originally wanted BigDog as a pack animal, but the first versions they field-tested were too loud. So DARPA partnered with some new brainiacs to build the next generation of robot dogs, calling them WarDogs. Supposed to be bigger, faster, tougher, and quieter. Some of them will be four-legged portable machine-gun nests, which is a little cool and a lot scary. I mean, think about having something like that come creeping up to your foxhole or into your camp and then opening up with a 50-caliber? Holy shit.”

“That is truly frightening,” Rudy said, and actually shivered.

“It’s all being developed under the project heading of ‘Havoc.’”

“‘Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of war’?” recited Rudy. “That’s a little on the nose for a project name, isn’t it?”

“Somebody probably got wood in his shorts when he thought it up and couldn’t bring himself to switch to anything less obvious.”

The plane continued to bounce around the ether, and Rudy kept drinking. I cut him a look.

“You’re making a face,” I said.

“A face? No, I’m not. What kind of face?”

“Of disapproval. You have something against robots?”

“On the whole?” said Rudy thoughtfully. “No. Rescue robots are saving lives all over the globe, and exploration robots will push back the boundaries of our knowledge without endangering human lives. But in combat? In that regard, I’m much less enthusiastic.”

“The military’s working on a mobile surgical robot, too,” I said. “To assist medics with emergency field surgery.”

“That’s less frightening,” he said. “Surgical robots have been in use for years. They used a variation of the da Vinci surgical suite on me,” he said, touching his knee. “Superbly fine-tuned. I highly approve of that kind of use. Are any of them autonomous?”

“To a degree,” I said, and I knew where he was going with this. A couple of years ago we had that whole mess with the drones, autonomous-drive systems and hacked GPS controls. It left a very sour taste in all our mouths. And it made us very, very afraid of all the ways in which that technology can be misused. “We’ve wandered away from nanotech and we’re both half drunk. Fuck. It’s inconvenient as balls to have Dr. Acharya out of touch. They’re not even allowing Internet or cell phones except during emergencies.”

“Doesn’t this thing in Baltimore qualify?”

“That,” I said, “is what we’re flying home to establish.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The lights came up and John glanced at his watch and then addressed the audience.

“I think we have time for a few questions,” he said. “If anyone—”

Dozens of hands shot into the air.

“Ah,” he said, and chuckled warmly. “Well, maybe we won’t have time to answer all your questions, but let’s start with you. Yes, in the third row, with the beard.”

A young man stood up, looking awkward and unkempt in faded jeans and an ancient UCLA sweatshirt. “Thanks, sir,” he said. “I enjoyed your presentation. My question, though, is about the socioeconomic effect of a curated technological singularity. One of the things you’ve talked about — here and online — is how the next generation of machines is already being built to improve farming, manufacturing, and so on. I get that this is an inevitable advancement, but what about the people who currently work in those fields? If an autonomous-drive combine harvester can operate twenty-four hours a day and in all weather conditions, won’t each eight-hour increment remove the potential for a farmer or farmworker to earn a day’s wage?”

Every eye shifted from the young man to the speaker, and he smiled at the audience.

“Yes,” said John, “that’s what it will mean.”

“So what happens to those farmworkers?”

The speaker walked slowly to the edge of the stage and stood looking down at the young man.

“Let me turn that around and ask you that question. What will become of those workers?”

“They’ll be out of a job.”

“Yes. And…?”

“If they can’t find other work, then they’ll have to get government assistance,” said the young man. “Which puts a drain on the system.”

“That is very true.”

“But those people need to have a chance to survive.”

John’s smile never flickered. “Do they?”

The young man blinked at him. “Of course they do.”

“Why?”

“Why not? They’re people. This is America. They deserve to—”

“Slow down, a bit,” said John, patting the air as if pushing the outrage back into manageable shape. “Don’t explode, calm down. This is a forum for understanding here, so let’s discuss this objectively, okay? Can you do that? Good. Now, give me pro and con on it. What is the basis for your argument that people deserve survival?”

“Um… because they’re people?”

John shook his head. “No. That’s a subjective view. It’s sentimental.”

“It’s humanist,” countered the young man.

“It’s compassionate, I’ll grant, but how does that factor into the dynamics of evolution?” He held up a hand before the young man could reply. “Darwin only understood part of the process of evolution. He looked at it in the natural world, and correctly judged that survival of the fittest was a biological imperative, and he separated that from human desire and the influence of politics or religion. Scholars and historians have since expanded on Darwin to explain everything from religious evangelism to conquest to eminent domain. However, too often they failed to understand that having conscious self-awareness has created a different kind of evolution. Call it curated evolution. An attempt to force an evolution of a certain element or elements of a group even when biology isn’t necessarily a willing accomplice.”

“Like what, eugenics?” demanded the young man.

“Sure, eugenics is part of it, but so is gerrymandering, so is the spread of religion through attrition, so is ethnic genocide, so are social caste systems and economic class distinctions, so is war, so is crime. I could go on and on. Human history is an index of attempts to curate the human species. We do it in thousands of ways, large and small. Some of it is reprehensible, of course. Hitler attempted a systematic genocide of Jews, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge exterminated twenty-five percent of the Cambodian population, there’s the Ba’ath Party’s systematic extermination of the Kurds, the Rwandan slaughter of a million Tutsi by the Hutu, and other atrocities. These acts were not only morally wrong — and here I’m momentarily agreeing with your humanism — but also inefficient. Totalitarian governments such as the People’s Republic of China persecuted intellectuals, killing or imprisoning visionary thinkers, because visionaries cannot abide pervasive oppression. The Chinese wanted obedience without opposition. They don’t want a better way or a brighter future, because that would involve change, and they like their militant-regime structure. It suits small minds. They hide behind the concept of the ‘dictatorship of the masses’ without understanding the long game implied in that.”

“So… you’re a socialist?”

“Did I imply that? No? How, then, do you infer it? I’m discussing curated evolution and citing examples of how that is done wrong. Communism isn’t a workable model. Neither, I might add, is the kind of extreme conservative thinking that works to establish a working class that approximates a new kind of slave labor while simultaneously making education harder to afford. That is such weak short-term thinking because it only provides for the group in power while they live but doesn’t provide for their offspring and future generations. It’s power used stupidly and without thought or caring about what’s coming next.”

The room was silent, and it was clear on the faces of many that they weren’t following the twists and turns of John the Revelator’s logic. A few were, and some even nodded. The young man in the UCLA hoodie merely looked uncertain.

“Tell me,” said John, “what is your opinion of Henry Ford?”

“He was a racist who hated Jews.”

“He was,” agreed John. “And what else?”

“He… um. Well, he perfected the assembly-line process. But that threw a lot of people out of work.”

“Did it? In old-fashioned car factories, sure, but didn’t it also create or help grow many other new industries. Because of Ford, car manufacturing flourished. So did tens of thousands of companies that became connected to car manufacturing. Oil production, gas stations, leather goods, metals mining and refining, plastics, glassware, the rubber industry, highway construction, commercial vending along driving routes, companies that make roadside signs and stoplights, car washes, parking lots, petrochemicals, auto-parts manufacturers and stores, auto mechanics, taxicabs, companies that make air fresheners, companies that make screws and nuts, and hundreds of thousands of businesses that depend on auto traffic bring them customers and… well, I could go on all day long. Sure, Henry Ford was an anti-Semitic ass. No one here will argue that. But look at the effect on us.”

The young man was shaking his head. “There are over five million traffic accidents per year in the United States, resulting in an average of thirty-two thousand deaths and over three million injuries. Cars release approximately three hundred and thirty million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, which is twenty percent of the world’s total. And they contribute seventy-two percent of the nitrogen oxides and fifty-two percent of reactive hydrocarbons.”

“Yes, they do,” said John, “and this is a problem. One I personally detest with the same ferocity with which I loathe anything that harms our biosphere. However, climate change aside, let’s consider the benefits to the population of ambulance services and firefighters and police who arrive in vehicles. People being able to commute to a better-paying job or take their kids to the right school or visit friends. The technological evolution from horse and buggy to motorized transport is a fact. Does it have a downside? Yes, of course, and some of those downsides are serious. But the benefits outweigh them. And isn’t technology being viewed as the solution to its own problem? The leaps forward in hybrid and electric cars, if managed correctly, will begin to reduce our carbon footprint. And e-commerce and telecommuting have already reduced the number of employees who need to drive to work and increased the number of customers who can shop at home. There are advances being made right now that will offer a better, safer, and more fulfilling life for humanity.”

He waved to the young man to sit and nodded to a middle-aged woman who had her hand up.

“You seem to be describing a pathway to Utopia,” she said. “But how can any advance in technology provide for everyone? Will seven or eight billion people have electric cars and nanomedicine sensors and autonomous home security? Most of the world’s population lives in poverty. Who will buy these things for them?”

John the Revelator looked at her for a long moment before he replied. “No one,” he said.

The woman said, “Then what will happen to them?”

“What happened to the saber-toothed cat, the dire wolf, the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo, the passenger pigeon, Steller’s sea cow, the Pyrenean ibex, or the woolly mammoth?”

“They were hunted to extinction.”

“In some cases, yes. In others they became extinct because of loss of habitat and a scarcity of resources. The panda is slowly crawling toward extinction despite concerted efforts to prevent it. Other species have become critically endangered, like the Cross River gorilla, the leatherback turtle, the Yangtze finless porpoise, and many more.”

“But we’re talking about people,” insisted the woman, her outrage making her voice sound shrill.

“We are talking about how species become extinct or are forced to evolve in order to earn their survival,” John countered. “More than ninety-nine percent of the five billion species that ever lived on earth are estimated to be extinct. And humans can’t be blamed for more than a fraction of that. So far there have been five mass extinctions, four of which occurred in the last three hundred and fifty million years. The Permian-Triassic extinction wiped out ninety percent of all species on earth. And the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event sixty-five million years ago wiped out much of the life on earth and forced the surviving dinosaurs into the adaptive evolution that turned them into birds. The dinosaurs that evolved, by the way, were descendants of the theropods, the predators. None of the big, slow, stupid plant eaters made the evolutionary cut.”

“That’s a horrible example,” said the woman curtly.

“It’s unpleasant,” John conceded, “but facts do not need to be pleasant in order to be true.” He turned to the rest of the crowd, effectively shutting her down. “Natural evolution is not a pleasant process. Survival of the fittest goes hand in hand with extinction of the unfit. No animal species has a right to survive unless it has become appropriately adapted to ensure that survival. Exceptions only exist in situations of catastrophe, such as natural climate change, volcanism, earthquakes, and so on. Even in places where species have thrived in the absence of predators, it is generally because the predators were wiped out or displaced by geological catastrophes. The Galapagos Islands are examples. Or, more recently and less sensibly, when humans disrupt the evolutionary equation by hunting a species to extinction, deforestation, repurposing of habitats, pollution, and so on. That is not curated evolution; it’s mere bungling and shortsightedness.”

The eyes of the audience members were filled with reserve, antagonism, disagreement, but that was fine with John. His mission was to tell the truth, not to lead converts to a promised paradise.

“The technological evolutionary process works best when it’s curated. The automobile industry was a clear benefit to progress, health, and other kinds of industrial development. It also benefited organic needs by allowing for the transport of bulk food across great distances. Trains, too, of course, and modern shipping. But we’ve seen the greatest leap forward with computers. The microchip and the personal computer have changed the world and changed how we, as a species, move forward. We are now on the brink of the next major step in that evolution. The rise of robotics in everyday life will change our cultural landscape as surely and completely as the automobile did. Will it displace people? Yes. Of course. Will it disrupt lives and ruin fortunes for those who are displaced? Yes. Is that sad and tragic? Sure. Is it unfair?” he asked. “No. It’s evolution, and not once in the history of the world — not in natural selection and not in the rise of human dominance on this planet — has ‘fairness’ played a significant role in the process of evolution. Not everyone will survive, because not everyone is suited to the process of survival. In the past this process required biological luck, but in the coming change it is the willing, the active, the participatory who will earn their place in the world that will be.”

The room fell into a very tense silence.

“When the technological singularity comes,” said John the Revelator, “and it will come, then we have to curate it, manage it, but also allow it. Otherwise, we will not deserve to survive the necessary extinction of the unworthy.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

Bunny broke into a dead run even as his mind tried to process what he was seeing. It made no kind of sense. Everyone inside the restaurant seemed to be fighting. A full-out brawl. Even from halfway across the parking lot, Bunny could see bodies wrestling and swinging wild punches and hurling chairs. The big picture window near where Top had been sitting was splashed with an arc of blood. Bunny knew that pattern. It was an arterial spray; nothing else could paint that much of the window with such force.

This wasn’t a brawl. These people were killing one another.

“What’s going on?” yelled Cole, who was right on his heels.

“Call it in!” he bellowed as he ran. “Christ, call it in!”

He reached the door, whipped it open, and stepped into a red nightmare.

There was so much going on, and it was so fully involved, that it took even his combat-experienced mind a full two seconds to process it. It looked like a riot. No, it looked like a war, but it was hard to understand the sides. The waitress who’d waited on Top and him held a heavy metal paper-towel dispenser and was using it to smash the face of a fat man in a camo T-shirt. The fat man’s mouth was smeared with blood, and there was a horrible bite on the waitress’ thigh.

Nearby, a thirtysomething woman in a sundress and flip-flops was stabbing a fisherman in the throat. A tall man with a Latino face and Asian eyes knelt on the floor and tried to use his body as a shield as two fry cooks snapped at him with bloody teeth. A teenage boy picked up a chair and swung it at one of the cooks, missed, lost his balance, and fell, and the other cook pounced on him. Both cooks snarled like dogs.

Bunny couldn’t find Top right away, and then he saw a pile of wriggling bodies against the wall. A brown-skinned arm looped over the edge of an overturned table and punched one of the figures, knocking him back with a shattered jaw.

“Top!” bellowed Bunny, but yell was all he did. He stood in the doorway, feet braced, eyes wide, fists balled, and couldn’t move.

He absolutely could not make himself take one step farther into that madhouse.

The blood.

The innocent people being torn apart.

It froze him.

It robbed him of so much of what he was, and it flooded his mind with all the images from that carnage on the gas dock months ago. He was as much in that other moment as he was in this one, and equally helpless.

Behind him, Tracy Cole was yelling. Yelling.

Identifying herself as a police officer. Ordering people to stop, to back off, to stand down. Bunny heard her words, understood their meaning, and yet he could not act in support of them.

“No,” he said in a voice so soft and lost that even he couldn’t hear it. “No.”

The day began to cant sideways, losing its hold on meaning and reality, and then it started falling too fast to catch.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Halfway across the country, Rudy fell asleep and I didn’t wake him and even waved off the flight attendant when lunch arrived. This was the most comfortable Rudy and I had been together in ages, and closer to the old rhythm we had as colleagues and best friends. I liked it.

The fact that we’re friends is odd, or maybe it’s proof that opposites attract. In most ways we’re completely unalike. I’m bigger, gruffer, less friendly, and more apt to offend people. A former lady friend once told me that my face looks as if it’s been hit at least once from every conceivable direction and with great enthusiasm. She wasn’t wrong. She also suggested that I probably deserved most of that battering. We were breaking up at the time, so that was unkind, but it wasn’t inaccurate. I tend to offend oftener than most, and more deeply.

Rudy, however, does not. Even though we’re about the same age, he’s always the grown-up in the room. People like and relate to him. You can watch the Rudy magic at work and not really grasp how it’s done. He can walk into a conference, or go into a crime scene, or sit in an airport lounge and people gravitate to him as if he’s magnetic. That’s possibly a mixed metaphor, but you get the point. Once people make contact with him, they act as if they’ve known him forever. If I had to guess what his secret is, it might be that Rudy actually listens, and he genuinely cares about people and what they have to say. He cares about who they are and what their life experience has been. You can see it when he meets people. Rudy can make you feel, without artifice or trickery, that his day would have been an empty nothing if he hadn’t had the good fortune of encountering you. People tell him the damndest things. They tell him things they wouldn’t tell a priest, their best friend, or an enthusiastic torturer. Being confronted with that much unfiltered interest, insight, and goodwill flips the switches that allow you to release so much of the tension you carry around. It lubricates the joints of your emotional machinery. It’s a key element of his success as a therapist, particularly with people who have suffered great trauma. In another life, Rudy could have been one of the great con men of all time, or the founder of a new religion. But he’s too honest for either of those things. Rudy is Rudy, and he’s the best person I know.

While Rudy slept, I read Sean’s report and the other material Duffy had sent me. There was a lot of detail but not enough information, if that makes sense. Sean was a thorough cop, but he was out of his depth, and clearly Doc Jakobs hadn’t been able to reach any useful conclusions. I mean, to be fair, he’s a medical examiner and this was bizarro shit. Even for a conspiracy theorist like him.

I looked at the photo of Holly Sterman from her fake driver’s license. It was issued in the name of Kya Hope. Kind of a sad, ironic choice of a last name, and I was drunk enough to read too much into it and thereby depress the living hell out of myself. It showed a pretty girl who smiled into the camera, but the smile was as plastic as the card. There was a look in her eyes. Not haunted, exactly, and not lost. No, there was a kind of resigned wisdom in that look. An acceptance of her circumstances as all she deserved and all she could accept. It came close to breaking my heart. I understood why Sean had become so deeply involved in this. It was the girl every bit as much as the strangeness of how she died.

We began our descent into Atlanta, where we’d change planes.

Because of all our devices for instant communication and constant interaction, the world often feels very small. It’s not. This is a big old world, and it has so much room for strange things to grow. Cults and extremist movements. Hatred and intolerance. Political agendas and greed-based business models. War and pain. As we flew, my thoughts drifted from Sean’s case to a moody, morose speculation of what else was out there. I wondered, as I too often did these days, what else was happening right now, at that moment, at any moment. What missile was being prepped for firing, literally or figuratively? What bomb was primed to go off? What infernal device was set to unleash a new kind of hell? That kind of speculation seems absurd if you don’t do what I do. Those of us in counterterrorism and antiterrorism and special operations have to think like that, because, cynical as it sounds, there are people out there planning very bad things. Or engaged in very bad things. People like me and my colleagues in the various covert-ops world and intelligence networks have to imagine bad things so we can look for them. We have to adjust our expectations so that we don’t observe the machinations of the world through rose-colored glasses. We have to be ready at a moment’s notice to jump when our worst expectations are realized.

So, I asked myself, who was out there doing something so bad that it was the DMS that would be called in? What were they doing? And, the worst question of all, would we find out about it in time to stop it? Bad, bad thoughts to brood on while flying high above it all.

Corrupt people were doing dreadful things. People were dying. How much of that would ever be my problem? I wasn’t the world’s best secret-agent man. I didn’t have some kind of no-borders global jurisdictional freedom of action. The DMS hadn’t been called for a lot of those cases. Right now, because of what happened last year, other teams were getting the jobs that should have come to the DMS. Jobs that should have come to me. My buddy Jack Walker and his SEAL Team 666 crew had been called in to handle a rogue genetics lab in Uganda. Sure, they kicked ass, took names, and rained down pure hell on the ass clowns who were trying to turn village kids into teenage supersoldiers, but that was supposed to be my gig. Did I feel put out?

No.

Maybe.

Not sure, actually. I felt closed out, which isn’t exactly the same thing. It was the same thing I felt when Tucker Wayne and his war dog, Kane, were dropped into the shit storm of a civil war in Trinidad. I felt it should have been me and Ghost. Jealous? That’s such an ugly word. Especially when it’s used with any kind of accuracy.

Church has tried to explain to me that I should be happy that there are other special-ops teams out there. Sigma Force, Chess Team, blah-blah-blah. I can’t expect to handle everything, and it’s unreasonable to want to be everywhere at once. And, let’s face it, some of those cases my friends have handled happened while I was otherwise engaged or laid up with stitches, drains, and splints.

Is it ego? I sipped my whiskey and thought about it. No, I decided. Not ego. Not exactly that.

It was fear.

After all the recent betrayals and shadow-government conspiracies we’d uncovered, I’d even begun to look at my friends and allies with a degree of suspicion. Justifiable or not. It’s hard enough when the bad guys are clever; it’s harder by an order of magnitude when you don’t know which of the good guys can be trusted.

That wasn’t the only thing twisting my nuts, though. I was afraid that one of these days there would be no one to answer the call. Not me and not anyone else. One of these days there would be a gap between one crime and the bigger one, between one catastrophe and one that really brings down the curtain, and all of us would be either off the clock, too bashed to stand, already under fire, or looking the damn wrong way.

It was the last part that scared me most of all.

If we’re reactive rather than proactive, what happens when we react too slowly or too late? What happens when we make the wrong call and go after one thing and miss the other? What’s the backup plan when we go charging in the wrong direction and before we can turn around it all blows up?

I’m rambling, I know. The inside of my head is untidy, and even my thoughts don’t follow a logical pattern sometimes. I’m going to blame it on the whiskey.

Yeah. That sounds good.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Bunny felt an impact and turned to see Tracy Cole shouldering her way past him. She had her service weapon in both hands and was fanning the barrel across the melee, but she didn’t fire.

Of course she didn’t fire. There was no clear aggressor here. No perpetrators. No criminals wearing masks to disguise their identities. No terrorists in black balaclavas to allow them to become faceless agents of a corrupted ideology.

These were ordinary people slaughtering one another.

She kept yelling at them, kept trying to impose order on a situation from which all sense and order had been swept. Then she turned and looked up at him.

“What the hell’s happening?” she demanded.

All Bunny could do was shake his head.

Suddenly there was a shot in the midst of the screaming, and they both turned to see Top Sims rise up on the far side of the overturned table, his pistol held high, barrel toward the ceiling as a young man in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts tried to claw his way toward the weapon. Top bled from long scratches on his forearm, and he had the man’s throat caught in one hard, brown hand. The shot had gone up into the ceiling, and Top had pulled his finger from the trigger guard after that one wild discharge.

A second young man — this one wearing a Gamecocks football T-shirt and jeans — dived at Top and the three of them vanished behind the table.

Suddenly Bunny was moving. His big body was in motion before he realized it. There were five or six people between him and his friend. Bunny hadn’t drawn his weapon. Against all training, it hadn’t even occurred to him. But he reached out with both hands and grabbed people by arms and scruffs and hair and clothes and hurled them away. He heard a roar and didn’t know if it was his own throat making that sound. The people flew like rag dolls, and it didn’t matter if they were small women or large men. He plucked them up and cast them out of his way and reached the table. At first all he could see was a tangle of arms and legs, clothes and blood. Then he saw the man in the football shirt biting Top. Biting his leg, trying to chew through Top’s trousers. From the way Top kicked, it was clear that he was in great pain, but there was no blood around the bite. Not yet.

Bunny bent forward and grabbed the man with both hands and tore him away from Top. Some of Top’s trouser came with him, caught between gnashing white teeth. Bunny pivoted and smashed the man into the closest wall. Even with all the screaming, the sound of breaking bones was like a bundle of breaking sticks. Bunny let the man drop and started to turn back to Top, but a hand caught his ankle and he stared down in shock and horror as the smashed man tried to claw his way forward to bite Bunny’s Achilles tendon.

“No,” Bunny said as an old horror surged to the surface of his mind. He had fought people like this before. People who were out of their minds, or beyond their minds. People who were totally lost in the urges of a hunger so deep, so terrible, that it consumed every part of who they had been, leaving only a thing in its place. A thing that needed to feed and could not be stopped by fear or intimidation or even pain. A hushed, frightened voice whispered urgently in his head.

Aim for the head… aim for the head. There’s no other way to stop them. Aim for the head.

He felt a hardness in his hand and stared down in stunned horror to see that he now held his gun. His arm raised the weapon. His traitor finger slipped inside the trigger guard and curled around the —

“No!”

His voice seemed to come from somewhere else.

His finger froze in place and he felt his leg lift, felt muscles flexed, took ownership of the reflex action, and then kicked out. It was a powerful kick, backed with rage and fear, and it caught the young man on the point of the chin, lifted him, snapped his head back, hurled him against the wall, dropped him.

The man’s eyes rolled high and white and he collapsed backward, panting but unconscious.

Unconscious.

That knowledge did something for Bunny. The man was alive but had been knocked out.

The dead could not be knocked out. The Walkers, the victims of the Seif al Din could not be dazed. They could only be fed or killed.

This, as dreadful as it was, was not that.…

Bunny felt something happen inside his chest and inside his head. On one side of a broken moment he was a victim, a helpless passenger in events that were spinning out of his control. On that side of time, he was still the man who had been destroyed on the gas dock last year.

And then that moment passed. It changed, and, in doing so, it changed him.

It was like someone rebooting the generators of a great power plant. There was darkness and stillness, and then there was a great clunk as the switch was thrown. There was the surge of starter power to the turbines, and then they began spinning and spinning, creating and reclaiming power. In his perception, this took a long time. Hours, ages. In the reality of that crisis, it was the other half of a moment.

And Bunny was back again.

He could feel himself return. His limbs no longer acted by reflex or accident. It was almost joyful.

Except that he was still in hell and the demons were tearing the world apart.

He spun, gripped the edge of the table, and flung it behind him. Top was pinned under the other young man and was clubbing at him with the artless, ineffectual blows of blind panic. It hurt Bunny to see it, because Top was never out of control. He was the stable center of Echo Team, and everyone knew it. Or, he had been before the gas dock. Since then he had been a ghost haunting his own life. As Bunny had been.

Bunny grabbed the attacker by the hair and hauled him backward. The man instantly hissed and spun and tried to bite Bunny’s arm. Bunny clubbed him with the butt of his pistol. Skin tore and bones cracked as the man flopped down.

Proof. More proof that this was only an outer ring of hell but not hell itself.

“You alive, old man?” Bunny growled as he caught Top under the arm and hauled him to his feet.

Top staggered, caught his balance, pushed away from Bunny. His eyes were filled with fear and confusion. “What the… what the…?” was all he could manage. The fighting — and the killing — raged around them.

Bunny didn’t know what else to do, so he belted Top across the mouth with the back of his left hand. The blow spun Top in a full circle and the older man nearly fell. He crashed against the window, rebounded, and Bunny stopped him with a hard, flat palm against his chest. Almost the same thing he had done to Tracy Cole’s boyfriend, but with an entirely different meaning. And a different effect.

Top slapped Bunny’s hand away and put the barrel of his pistol hard against the underside of Bunny’s chin.

“The fuck you doing, Farm Boy?” demanded Top. “You gone and lost your shit, too?”

Bunny held his gun up so that Top could see it. And see that it wasn’t pointed at him.

“This is your six o’clock wake-up call,” said Bunny.

Top stared at him as if he was insane.

And there was another fractured moment of change, except this time Bunny could see it happen to someone else. Top was gone, wrecked, ruined… and then he wasn’t.

Top licked his lips, blinked his eyes, and lowered his gun.

Tracy Cole was across the room, pulling a woman away from several bleeding kids. Bodies lay sprawled. A few people crawled between struggling groups, leaving trails of blood behind them. People screamed in fear, howled like animals.

“It’s not Seif al Din,” said Bunny again.

Top nodded. He raised his pistol and took it in both hands, searching for a target. Bunny placed his fingers lightly on Top’s wrist.

“They’re civilians,” said Bunny.

Top looked at him, then at the people, then nodded again. It meant something different now. He blew out his cheeks and then shoved his pistol back into its holster. Bunny did the same.

Together they waded, unarmed, into the madness.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

“You talk about the technological singularity almost like a religion,” said the professor.

“No,” said John the Revelator, “not almost like. It is a religion. Singularitarianism is very real and very valid.”

The professor smiled faintly. “And what is the theological basis of this religion?”

“Well, to understand it would mean to step back from standard views of what a religion is. It certainly isn’t Christian or Abrahamic.”

“Not all religions are,” said the professor.

“Of course not. There’s Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Taoism, and hundreds of smaller religions, including extinct religions such as the worship of the Greek, Roman, Norse, and Egyptian pantheons. There are probably more extinct religions than active ones, wouldn’t you agree?”

“There’s a commonality, though,” said the professor. “A belief in a higher power, even if that higher power is as vague as the energy in, say, plants or a certain species of animal. A bird, perhaps. What is the god of singularitarianism?”

“There isn’t a god. Not in the traditional sense.”

“Then what?”

“You might say that it’s a kind of animism in which the technology of computers, software, and robotics is collectively the locus of the sacred. So, in pure terms, the technological singularity is atheistic.”

“How, then, is that a religion?”

John spread his hands. “What is atheism but a denial of theism? To most people, atheism is the denial of the Abrahamic God. Again I point to Taoists, Buddhists, the worshippers of Baal, and countless others as religions in which the Judeo-Christian version of God is either not worshipped or simply not a factor. And let’s not forget atheists when we count the number of devoted adherents to religion. In my experience, there are few evangelists more dedicated to proselytizing than an atheist who wants to prove that his cosmological view is correct.” He laughed. “How many of them pretend to worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster as part of their denial of religion, when in fact they’re practicing a religion regardless.”

“How does that relate to computers? Technology isn’t a god.”

“Is it any less of a legitimate god than Thor or the Navajo Hero Twins, or Hotei the Japanese god of abundance, or the deity du jour of any given culture? People worshipped those gods with their whole hearts, and you cannot tell me that their faith was false simply because that religion became extinct.”

The professor shook his head. “That’s not what I’m saying. Those cultures worshipped a spiritual concept. Technology isn’t spirit.”

“Is it not? Prove that robots have no spirits, no souls.”

“They are machines.”

“Humans are organic machines. If you want to have the debate as to whether any of our thoughts, emotions, or beliefs are real or the product of brain chemistry, environmental survival instincts, and evolution, by all means. We can go deeper and discuss whether the universe was created by a freak accident of physics or shaped by intelligent design. Do you want to have that discussion?”

“No,” said the professor, though he looked uncomfortable.

“No, of course not, because there is no beginning or end to it,” said John. “There is no way to resolve the argument, because infinity isn’t quantifiable and therefore we cannot know what actually created everything. We don’t know the limits of eternity. We don’t know the limits of subatomica any more than we know how many dimensions exist or what constitutes reality. We don’t know any of that. So how can you, a learned scientist and teacher, tell me that a machine has no soul just because its component parts were assembled by humans, or by other machines designed by humans? If we humans have souls, then you cannot, with absolute certainty or veracity, say with perfect knowledge that no trace of our souls has been shared with machines. You’d like to say it, but you can’t.”

“I don’t believe it,” said the professor, and that made John smile more broadly.

“So it’s a matter of belief?”

The professor sighed. There were some snickers from the audience, possibly from his students.

John said, “Just because singularitarians don’t believe in God, or even a god, does not mean that they are not part of a religious movement. A case can be made that singularitarianism is not substantially different in structure and approach from, say, Neoplatonism. The way in which the potential and emerging realities of AI are viewed is not substantially different from Neoplatonic views of the Plotinian Nous. Couple that with aspects of Western animism that are reflected, in one way or another, in writings about AI and the singularity. Even the unenlightened general public reacts to AI and some aspects of robotics in the same way they react to human minds and animals. I joke about the Terminator movies and how Skynet became self-aware, yet this is a valid concern of those who are aware of the potential for AI but misunderstand its true nature. They see computers as minds that are waking up and that, once awakened, possess humanlike emotions, goals, and desires.”

“That’s a distortion by people who don’t understand the nature of computer intelligence,” countered the professor.

“And now you’re skating on very thin ice, my friend,” said John. “Of course it’s a belief, and belief is the core element of any religion. People believe in the singularity, in computer intelligence, in the potential — good or bad — of intelligent computers. Some fear it and some love it, even though virtually no one completely understands it, and how is that different from the emotions felt by the worshippers of any church anywhere in the world, anytime in the history of humankind.”

The professor continued to argue, but John continued to shoot him down. Gently, but with the kind of authority that began edging the majority of the audience toward accepting the validity of what he was saying.

John said, “The singularity is a challenging belief when misunderstood. It does not posit the physical appearance of a god. No bushes will ignite, no angels will blast trumpets. The focus of the belief is not in any kind of humanoid deity. There will be no towering figure with a white beard. The god of the technological singularity is an AI superintelligence that is both human in origin and divine in potential. It will lift up those who worship it in the way that it needs to be worshipped, meaning those who embrace the benefits of evolving technology, and it will damn those who resist it.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Top and Bunny stood there, covered in blood, hands red to the wrist, chests heaving, minds burning like cinders. All around them were bodies. The living and the dead. Tracy Cole stood with her back to the wall, brown face gone dead pale, her gun hanging from a slack hand, feet braced as if the floor was going to tilt under her and send her sliding into the pit.

Bunny reached a trembling hand to his ear and tapped his earbud, tapped again, and then realized that he wasn’t wearing it. His mouth opened and closed like a fish as he began slapping his pockets until he found his cell phone, dug it out, punched the speed dial for Captain Ledger. A voice-mail message told him that Ledger would not be reachable until…

Bunny hung up and cut a look at Top. His friend looked sick. Physically sick. They had been forced to resort to savagery and brutality to stop the people in the restaurant from killing one another. Doing harm to stop harm. There was a joke in there somewhere, but Bunny couldn’t find it. He punched in a different code. The call was answered on the second ring.

“Systems,” said a voice.

“Pier One,” said Bunny, fumbling the right code words out of the debris in his mind. “Green Giant to command. I have a biohazard situation. Type unknown. Human vector probable. Multiple casualties. I need a brushfire response team, and I need command to intercept first responders.”

Church came on the line. “Green Giant,” he said, using Bunny’s combat call sign. “A full biohazard team is inbound. Local law is being told to set up and maintain a perimeter but to abide by it. Give me a sitrep.”

“It’s bad,” said Bunny. “I think we have eight or ten dead. Twenty injured. Lots of bites. It’s not Seif al Din.” He told Church how the incident had played out.

“Is either of you injured?” asked Church.

“No, sir. Cuts and scrapes.”

“Is either of you bitten?”

Bunny looked at Top, met his eye, then nodded down to the torn trouser leg. Bunny gave an uptick of the chin, and Top pulled the pant leg up. The skin below was badly bruised, but there was no blood, no torn flesh.

“No, sir,” said Bunny into the phone. “We, um, might have some contamination in superficial wounds. Foreign blood in cuts. Our shots are current.”

All DMS field agents received regular vaccinations for the most common biological threats. None of those shots would stop a newly designed bioweapon, but often the weapons used by terrorist groups were common viruses and bacteria, ranging from anthrax to tuberculosis. Bunny doubted that they had been inoculated against whatever the hell had happened here.

“What about Officer Cole?” asked Church.

“She’s good. No injuries.”

The sirens were getting louder now, filling the air with a banshee wail loud enough to drown out most of the piteous cries of the wounded and the dying. Bunny didn’t even dare try to triage the wounded. Neither Bunny nor Top had any idea what this was or whether it was contagious, and they didn’t have hazmat suits in the car. Leaving the wounded untouched, though, felt like a truly criminal act.

“Very well,” said Church, bringing Bunny back to the moment. “Remain there and liaise with first responders. Flash Homeland badges and make sure there’s no press access to the scene. Try to minimize the risk of cell-phone pictures of this going on the Internet.”

“Sir… no one here is in any shape to post a tweet.”

“Let’s hope not.” Church’s answer was covered in thorns. Last year video footage of the gas-dock massacre went viral. Luckily, Echo Team had been wearing unmarked combat gear and balaclavas with goggles. Lucky for them, that was. The people on the dock had been hellishly unlucky, and Bunny had tortured himself by watching those videos so many times that Lydia, his live-in lover, ratted him out to Rudy Sanchez.

“You want me to collect cells and tablets?” asked Bunny.

“Yes, once you have protective equipment. I’ll have Bug see what he can do to interrupt cell service in the area. Now, listen to me, Green Giant,” said Church, “you are very likely in shock right now. That’s understandable. We all have damage, we all have scars, and we’re all afraid. That is part of being human and part of doing what we do. But, Sergeant…?”

“Sir?”

“I don’t need two damaged humans out there. I need two soldiers. I need two of my top agents, and I need them working at their best. Are we clear?”

Outside, the first of the patrol cars came screaming into the parking lot.

“Yes, sir,” said Bunny “Crystal clear.”

“You’ve been off your game, as have many of our fellow operators. Today proves that we don’t have the luxury of letting our hurt limit our effectiveness. You and your partner have been going through the motions for months now. Do better.”

Bunny listened to the dead air on the phone, then he lowered it. All around him was carnage, hurt, and need.

“Yes, sir,” he said again, although there was only him to hear it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

We landed in Atlanta, and while we hustled to make our connection I saw that I’d missed calls from Top, Bunny, and Aunt Sallie. All marked “urgent.” I called Top first, and waved Rudy over so that he could listen in as Top told us a horror story.

“And you weren’t affected?” I asked.

“No,” said Top. “I was in the restaurant and Bunny was outside. Neither of us got hit. Maybe it was something in the food — a chemical agent, maybe. Nothing airborne or I would have gotten it, since I didn’t go outside with Bunny. Nothing in what we ate or drank. From what I can tell, Cap’n, this mostly hit the staff. All of them — cooks and waitresses — were aggressors. A few customers, too, and from what we’ve been able to piece together they were regulars, which fits if it’s something inside the place and there’s a lag between exposure and freaking the fuck out. Most of the other customers were fighting, but it was self-defense or them trying to protect other people. Our team is onsite and has been collecting samples of everything. There’s a lot to test, and they’re telling me that it might be hours before we can point a finger at whatever triggered this. We have a Bughunters team en route, and I’m going to have them pull the kitchen apart, look in the ventilation system, whatever. Could even be a bacteria or fungus on some food they had delivered. In the meantime, we locked down the whole area.”

“You want me there?”

“No, sir.”

“You want any other backup?”

“No, sir,” he said again. “Not until we know there’s someone to chase. Riverdog Team is on its way from Charleston, but right now it’s all on the forensics kids and they’re all over this.”

I paused, then asked, “How are you both doing?”

He knew what I meant. “It’s been a day, boss. But… believe it or not, we’re better than we been for a while, if you can dig that.”

“Actually, I can.”

I told him my arrival time in Baltimore and said to have Bug patch him through to the pilot if necessary.

“Cowboy,” Rudy said as I pocketed my phone, “we could turn the matter in Baltimore over to Sam and change our tickets.”

I thought about it but shook my head. “No, let’s stick to plan A.”

Neither of us liked it, but then again there was no part of any of it that felt comfortable. As he walked over to join the line of people preparing to board our next flight, he said, “Do you know how many times I wished I’d gone to veterinary school instead?”

“Preaching to the choir, my brother,” I told him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

It took a while for Top to find a hole in the commotion to have a conversation with Officer Tracy Cole. The young cop looked scared, confused, and angry in equal measure, but Top liked the way she handled herself. She didn’t raise a ruckus about being pulled into something outside her experience, nor did she try to exit the scene to distance herself from the responsibilities attached to a catastrophe. Top had seen good cops and good soldiers do that, because they lacked the empathy necessary to help civilians through a moment that will forever gouge a mark in their lives. Cole helped as often as she could, and when the forensic teams asked her to step back she did so without question or protest.

He found Cole in the parking lot staring at the crab house, sitting on a low stone wall. She rose as he approached.

“As first impressions go,” she said, “this was a shit sandwich.”

“With cheese,” agreed Top. “I’m going to bet you have some questions for me.”

“Oh… one or two.”

“Ask what you need to ask and I’ll tell you what I’m allowed to say.”

“That deal sucks ass.”

“It’s what we have,” said Top.

Cole pointed to the restaurant. “What do you know about that?”

“You know as much as I do, and that is the God’s honest,” he said.

Cole studied him. “Would you even tell me if it was something more than that?”

“I’d tell you that I couldn’t tell you,” said Top. “I’d give you that much respect.”

She thought about it, nodded. “Okay.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Is this the sort of thing you people deal with?” asked Cole. “I mean, you have the most elaborate forensic collection team I’ve ever seen. Like, science-fiction stuff. Is this some kind of terrorist attack? A bioweapon or something?”

“I don’t know, but we have to react like it is. We’re frontline, Ms. Cole. We deal with a lot of extreme stuff, and, just like cops, we’ve learned that everything leaves a trace and that forensics is every bit as important to us as guns and reliable intelligence reports. Tools in the toolbox, you dig?”

“Yes,” she said. “I saw something, though, and you’re not going to like what I’m going to ask next.”

“I know what you’re going to ask,” he said. “You saw me freeze and you saw Bunny freeze.”

She nodded, and again her dark eyes searched his face.

“It’s been a bad year for the good guys,” he said. “Me and the Farm Boy have been through some shit. We almost got benched. Maybe should have been benched. Lot of guys we knew and guys we worked with got taken off the board, and maybe we all been feeling some of that PTSD. Maybe we lost a step getting to first base. This gig was supposed to be a way to work back up to speed. We’re out here scouting for new players because our roster’s pretty thin. This — whatever the fuck this is — isn’t why we’re here. We haven’t been put back in the field yet, and I guess you saw why.”

“You snapped out of it, though,” she said.

Top smiled at her. “That’s a kind thing to say, Ms. Cole, but we definitely lost that step. Question’s going to be whether we broke through some kind of barrier or if we’re going to freeze again. No way to know. I’d like to think we’re back in gear, but wishful thinking don’t make it so.”

“And you want me to join this?”

He smiled. “Ain’t offered you the job yet.”

Cole didn’t smile back. “So offer me the goddamn job.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

While waiting for our plane to taxi, I called Violin and gave her some of the details on my case. She didn’t like the coincidence of sex workers and nanotech any more than I did.

“Is this an official DMS case?” she asked. “Have you opened a file?”

“Everyone keeps asking me the same thing, and until I get there I won’t know.”

“It will be connected to Prague, Joseph,” she told me.

“Maybe.”

She paused. “Mother tells me that your resources are paper-thin these days. Especially over the last forty-eight hours. Is that a pattern or something…?”

“MindReader says no.”

“I don’t trust MindReader to make that call.”

“What does Oracle say?” I asked.

Another, longer pause. “We’re having some problems with Oracle. Our system has been attacked, but we don’t know by whom. Mother took it offline.”

“Shit. Call Yoda or Bug — maybe they can help.”

“I’m waiting for a callback,” she said. “Joseph, we can both agree that my mother is a bit paranoid and—”

“A bit?” I echoed, but she ignored me.

“—and that she sees threats in every shadow.”

“To be fair,” I said, “she’s right a lot more than she’s wrong.”

“That’s my point,” said Violin. “She thinks that the failure of Oracle and the growing ineffectiveness of MindReader are connected. Just as she believes the sharp rise in major violent cases around the globe is connected. Take a step back to give yourself perspective. The two most powerful counterterrorism computer systems — the ones used by the DMS and Arklight — are functioning at reduced levels and producing questionable intel just when a rash of threats begin stretching the resources of virtually every special-operations team. Doesn’t that sound like a large coordinated plan?”

“An argument can be made that the whole world is for shit right now,” I countered. “And that terrorists are relying on social media to coordinate more effective hits, using technology that is readily available on the commercial market. And that this uptick in attacks has put undue strain on computer systems that were never designed for this level of demand.”

“Oh, Joseph,” she said after a moment. “The last few years have not been kind to you. When I met you, you would never have been this cautious or this naïve.”

“I’m not being naïve.”

“What, then? Have all the attacks on the people you trust made you afraid? In the last two years they’ve gone after Junie, killed Bug’s mother, nearly killed Aunt Sallie, forced you to injure Rudy, killed more of your team members than I can count, and revealed your heroes to have clay feet. It seems to me, Joseph, that someone has learned how to manage you, to manipulate you. If they can’t stop you, then they hurt you by harming those you care about. It’s true, Joseph, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. Ask the man you work for. How many times has he gone outside of the Special Projects Office, outside of the DMS itself, and handed cases to other people?”

I said nothing for a long, long time.

“Joseph,” said Violin more gently, “even if this is true, even if they have done this to you, it doesn’t mean you have to let it stay true.”

“Yeah,” I said without enthusiasm.

She sighed. “Look, I’ll poke into the nanotech thing from my end. Please… please… consider what I’ve said. Stop fighting a defensive fight. Stop letting them dictate the rules of engagement to you.”

And then she was gone.

As I sat down, Rudy suddenly shivered.

“You cold?” I asked.

He gave me a strange smile, almost a frown. “You know that expression ‘someone just walked over my grave’? I just had the strangest and most intense feeling that we’re making a mistake.”

“Mistake? What kind of mistake? About coming here rather than going to South Carolina?”

He started to answer a couple of times, stopped each time, and gave a small wince of frustration. “It’s hard to say, because I don’t put a lot of trust in premonitions.”

“I do,” I said. “Try me.”

Even with that, Rudy took a few seconds before he spoke. “Joe, do you ever get the feeling that something very bad is about to happen?”

“You know I do. All the damn time. It’s a professional hazard.”

“No, I mean right now.”

I leaned close. “With what? The plane? Or with Top and Bunny?”

“No. And not to any of us directly.” He winced again. “I feel silly for even saying this, but I had a sudden powerful feeling that something very big and very bad is about to happen. Today, or at least soon. I don’t know where or what or to whom, but the feeling was so palpable, so urgent, that I had to say something.”

“And you have no idea what it is?”

“None. I know that’s not helpful, Joe, but I’m telling you what I felt. And I’m not saying this is real or that we should give any credence to what’s probably nothing at all.”

I studied him. “I can see the look in your eyes, brother. You don’t think this is nothing. You’re actually spooked.”

He leaned back, and I could see him trying to look inward, to capture what it was he’d felt. He shook his head, thought about it, shook it again.

“It’s gone. As I said, Joe, it’s silly, it’s nothing.”

“Do you at least know if it’s connected to Sean and all that? Or with the guys?”

He gave that real thought. “Maybe, but, to tell you the truth, Cowboy, it felt more like we were being” — he fished for the right word — “played, I suppose. Manipulated. I’m sorry, Joe, there just isn’t any more, and I urge you not to take it too seriously. Let’s let it go for now, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, remembering what Violin said about her mother’s paranoia. I got a chill up my spine, too. The plane’s big engines roared as it accelerated down the runway.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

“I don’t mean to sound rude,” said the graduate student after John gave him the nod, “but what you haven’t made clear is how a curated technological singularity could actually come about. It seems to me that there would be quite a lot of pushback on it, since it would require that whole sections of the global population accept a worldview that isn’t in keeping with their religious, societal, or political cultures.”

“Yes,” said John brightly, “that is correct. Two-thirds of the world, give or take, would object to this new model for our global evolution.”

“Exactly,” said the grad student, thinking he had just scored a major point. “Which means that they would prevent it from happening.”

“And how would they accomplish that?”

“Well… with political pressure. With reliance on their institutions,” said the grad student. “Their church, their local politicians — at least the ones who care about them as viable constituents. Through pressure from social-media outrage.”

“Yes, they would try all of that.”

“Well, surely they would do more than try.”

“Only if we assume that the current model for resistance to change is in full force and practice once the process of change begins.”

“It would have to be, wouldn’t it?” asked the young man, confusion warring with amusement on his bearded face.

“Ah,” said John, raising a finger. “That is rather the point.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

John looked around the room. There were nearly a hundred people gathered for tonight’s talk. Most of them students. Young, hopeful, intelligent faces.

“There is a way for it to happen, but you won’t like it.”

The young man shrugged. “Try me.”

“Remember that I said this evolutionary step would be curated. However, for the purposes of this discussion, let’s replace curator with gardener. We can agree that it is the purpose of a gardener to tend the garden. To plant, to till, to encourage growth, and to oversee the health of the garden as a whole. Can we agree on that definition?”

“Sure…?” said the grad student, though there was some caution in his reply, making it almost a question.

“If the garden is invaded by crabgrass, creeper vines, and kudzu, it would be the responsibility of the gardener to remove those threats. If the garden becomes overgrown, it is the task of the gardener to prune it all back in order to preserve it, even if that means cutting a rosebush back to sticks or cutting down a tree that has succumbed to root rot or blight. Allowing overgrowth is every bit as dangerous to the health of the garden as permitting the continued presence and dominance of parasites.”

The room was absolutely silent. No one spoke; no one even moved.

John smiled and nodded. “You see… I said you wouldn’t like it.”